One of the very few Twitter feeds I follow is "John Wayne Official"@JohnDukeWayne. I think the feed's name is a bit unwieldy and I suspect Wayne would have agreed.
“I never have really become accustomed to the ‘John.’ Nobody ever really calls me John… I’ve always been Duke or Marion or John Wayne. It’s a name that goes well together, and it’s like one word."
Whoever manages the feed is a fairly regular poster, frequently dropping screenshots from his huge library of movies or candid photos of his personal life with family and friends.
Each time I get a notification from the account, I smile, wondering what the Duke would have thought about having an online presence. Considering the times we live in can be described as a glut of oversharing, I suspect Wayne would heed his own counsel.
“Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.”
The Duke remains one of my childhood heroes. Self-confident, self-starting, and self-assured. Slow to anger, a fiercely loyal friend, and a very determined adversary, his silver screen persona was someone my starry-eyed 6-year-old self could aspire to. A smattering of "Duke-isms" continues to serve as inspiration in my life even today.
"Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway."
“Life is getting up one more time than you’ve been knocked down.”
Wayne was definitely an OG man's man actor whose career began back in the silent movie era. Over the decades, he amassed an extremely prolific 150 screen credits. Despite this, he only garnered three Oscar nominations, winning only one of the statuettes. When asked about his poor showing at the premier awards ceremony, his reply was in character and on point.
“You can’t eat awards. Nor, more to the point, drink them.”
A recent phenomenon, alongside the scourge of oversharing, is the tendency to excoriate historical figures for their words or actions. Wayne, himself, came under scrutiny a few years back.
If Wayne wasn't playing a cowboy, chances are he was portraying a soldier. He would, in fact, go on to depict multiple characters from all branches of the armed forces. Ironically, he never served in the military. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Wayne was 34 years old and was exempted from the draft due to his age. Further, he requested and was granted 3-A status - as the sole source of financial income for his family, drafting him into service would impose an undue economic hardship on his wife and two children. Regardless, many of his Hollywood peers found ways to serve in either a support capacity or even the front lines. Wayne's decision to sit out the war would haunt him for the rest of his life. Close associates postulate it fueled the hyper-patriotic zeal he settled into later in life. While his exemptions were legitimate, it hasn't stopped modern pundits from labeling Wayne a draft dodger.
More damning were Wayne's words during a May 1971 interview with Playboy magazine. The oft-quoted excerpts are derogatory comments Wayne made about African-Americans and Native Americans. This interview is the primary reason for USC, Wayne's alma mater, moving an exhibit dedicated to his achievements to a less prominent location within the school's Cinematic Arts Library.
Recently, Wayne's son, Ethan, defended his late father, portraying him rather as someone who judged all individuals on the merit of their character.
"Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday."
A common admonition is, "Don't meet your heroes." I don't believe this. Personally, I wish I could share a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle and a couple of aged cigars sitting across from the Duke around the firepit in my backyard. I wish we could share a conversation about his favorite leading lady, Maureen O'Hara, sea stories about his yacht, The Norwester, and what the bloody hell was he thinking taking on the role of Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. I imagine we'd also get around to that Playboy interview. Contrary to learning he had feet of clay, I think I'd be quite relieved that my hero was...human.
“Nobody should come to the movies unless he believes in heroes.”
Dad was not a fan of The Three Stooges and their slapstick comedy. He once even banned me from watching the trio after I started emulating their antics. However, I do remember both of us sitting through one of their skits that involved the following exchange between Moe, Larry, and Curly and an actress playing a soothsayer.
Soothsayer: "I'm your new soothsayer, the Seeress of Roebuck."
Larry: "Your father must be Roebuck."
Soothsayer: "No, for I was raised by Montgomery."
Curly: "Oh, you're Montgomery's ward!"
Dad was howling. His sudden roaring laughter shocked the bejeezus out of me. In all my 5 years on this earth, I'd never heard him laugh that hard and that loud.
While Dad was a pretty good writer and could appreciate a good pun, it just happened that Montgomery Ward was Dad's all-time favorite department store. A lot of our home furnishings and major appliances came out of those doors. It was also his go-to place for supplies for any projects around the house. One of these projects was my first "real" bicycle.
After I ditched the training wheels and outgrew my starter bike, Dad salvaged a rusty frame from an old Schwinn and we got to work. After a thorough sanding, we shot it with a coat of primer and laid down multiple layers of a dark ocean blue. The rear rim and tire were recovered along with the frame, and the tire was 2" thick and solid rubber. Dad was particularly proud of that find. "You'll never get a flat with that!"
The rest of the bike was trimmed out in pure '70s awesomeness - looong banana seat, high rise handlebars, and, attached to the frame, a 6-foot long fiberglass rod with a neon orange pennant on the end. You'd be able to see me coming from over the horizon. On the last day of the build, Dad pulled something out of his toolbox that would be the crowning glory of this project. As I looked on, I saw his hand held an official Montgomery Ward embossed foil sticker. He approached the bike and carefully wrapped it around the frame. The bike was already just too cool, but that little bit of bling was like chroming out a hotrod. I was sure it would give me an extra 10 - 15 mile an hour boost cruising the neighborhood streets. "There you go, Wayne. No one else has a bike like this!"
The freedom and mobility a kid gets with his first bike are indescribable. My range of exploration and all the adventures that were opened up outshone anything available on the dozen or so channels we had on TV. On summer days and afternoons during the school year, I was gone. Some neighborhood quest or recent comic book acquisition by one of my buds always demanded a road trip.
This bike turned out to be the proving ground for my first attempts at finding my personal style with further customizations. I realize everyone did this, but taping a playing card to my rear frame to get that click-click sound off my rear tire spokes was the absolute shiznit. I also got into spoke reflectors and probably went a little overboard. My wheels looked like solid discs of amber and white. The coolest add-on was this little dinky headlight I bought after saving my allowance for a month. Attached to my handlebar, it ran off a 9-volt battery and likely couldn't cast a shadow in a pitch-black room. But I didn't care. I had a headlight! On my bike!
That bike and I traveled a lot of miles, crisscrossing streets and trails in my old neighborhood, and I hadn't thought about it in years. If I remember correctly, it was stolen one night after I failed to securely chain it to the tree near our front stoop. I was utterly crushed. As the months went on, Mom and Dad decided I was old enough to handle a bigger bike, and that Christmas, I found a 10-speed beside our tree. I was grateful to have it, and on its first road test, I was shocked at the speeds I could achieve with the multiple gears. It also helped that my rear tire wasn't a 15-pound hunk of solid rubber.
I've been through several road bikes since then, and each, in turn, has stories to tell about the time in my life that we rode together. But none of them have had the absolute chutzpah of personality as that salvaged old frame with the Montgomery Ward sticker.
Back in the fall of '85, LBHS had its annual Halloween Fest, allowing students to don a costume for the day. Because we'd just finished reading The Great Gatsby in junior English, and I was pretty lame, I donned a bathrobe, pajamas, and the ascot from my band uniform and attempted to pass myself off as Jay Gatsby. I spent the rest of the day greeting people, "How do you do, old sport?" Yep. Lame.
One of my best buds, Noel, showed up dressed in full face paint, baseball uniform, and wooden bat, looking like a cross between a Kiss groupie and a major league fanboy. He saw the confusion on my face and attempted to clue me in. Shaking his head at yet another of my pop culture failings, he said, "I'm one of the Furies from The Warriors." This was delivered in a deadpan, "it's as obvious as the sky is blue" tone, but I was still no closer to enlightenment. He shouldn't have been surprised. I wasn't a big moviegoer back then and am probably one of the few GenX'ers who never saw Star Wars in a movie theater, let alone The Warriors.
The Warriors, released in 1979, started with a nighttime conclave of all the gangs in New York City attempting to unite under a single leader and in essence control the city. Unfortunately, in the middle of the meeting, Cyrus, the charismatic leader who called for the assembly, was assassinated. The Warriors, a gang based out of Coney Island, was wrongfully accused of the hit. They spent the rest of the movie traversing the 30 miles from the Bronx to make it back to their home turf, dodging hostile gangs and NYPD all along their route.
What piqued my interest was the whole movie was based on one of the most famous military retreats in history with the possible exception of Dunkirk. In 401 BC a contingent of Greek soldiers allied themselves with Cyrus of Persia to take the Persian throne. In the ensuing Battle of Cunaxa, Cyrus was killed, leaving the band of Greeks deep in hostile Persian territory. Like the Warriors, they fought a constant rearguard action to get back to the relative safety of the Mediterranean shoreline.
Apart from sparking a few gang-related riots at some screenings, the movie did OK at the box office. Apparently, then-President Reagan was a fan, and he called the male lead personally to offer his congratulations on his portrayal. If you were a fan of PBS programming back in the day, you may remember a show called 3-2-1 Contact. One of the original hosts, Trini, had a cameo in The Warriors. Yep. Lame.
Back at LBHS, even with Noel's Cliff Notes version, his outfit still didn't make sense. I just shrugged, "Man, it kinda looks ridiculous." Without missing a beat, he clapped back, "Pfft. Have you seen yourself?" Fair point.
The Warriors recently showed up on one of our streaming services so I queued it up and watched it for just the 2nd time. Spoiler alert: The hero squad successfully battles their way to Coney Island, the real perpetrator of the hit on Cyrus got his comeuppance, and the fighting spirit and tenacity of the Warriors was acknowledged.
As the closing credits roll, a gem from Joe Walsh starts to play.
The origin of this proverb is unknown, but one of its meanings according to Wikipedia is "that good intentions, when acted upon, may have unintended consequences."
In one of his first campaigns to move China into modernity, Mao Zedong declared war on sparrows. The rationale was that flocks of sparrows pilfered grain from farm fields and measurably reduced the total harvest. The campaign of destroying nests and eggs and hunting adult birds was dramatically effective in decimating the sparrow population. However, with no predators to keep them in check, swarms of locusts ravaged the country's grain fields. This resulted in a famine responsible for 45 million deaths.
Uninformed dictators aren't the only ones subject to making bad decisions. In Brazil, scientists crossbred European honeybees with an African species. The European bees were docile and produced superior honey, but at low yields in the tropical climate. The African species produced inferior honey, but, being native to a warmer climate, their output was much greater. The intent was a docile bee with a high output. Instead, they got a highly aggressive bee with mediocre honey.
In 1967's The Graduate, Mr. McGuire famously gave Benjamin a single word of advice: "Plastics". Believe it or not, plastics were once considered a panacea to environmental concerns of the mid 20th century. A very ductile raw material, plastic is light, nearly unbreakable, and lasts darn near forever. No longer would we need to chop down swaths of trees for lumber or paper products. Soon everything from dinner plates and furniture to a good portion of automobiles was plastic. As we now know, while plastic has its uses, its ubiquitous use in everything, particularly single-use items, is now a global ecologic debacle.
After VE day in WWII, allied war planners turned their attention to the Japanese home islands. Based on the Japanese Imperial Army's fanatical defense of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, projected American casualties for such an invasion were starkly grim. Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project team delivered what was touted as a way to save those lives. When his team tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico, Oppenheimer recalled the reaction of his crew.
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent."
Whether it's reducing our carbon footprint, implementing sweeping changes in domestic policy, or making quantum advances in the sciences, progress is good. The trick is to not be as reckless as a petulant 2-year old. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something.
"The only constant in life is change." - Heraclitus
In Filipino culture, you're gifted with a lot of names. Aside from the standard first and last, your middle name isn't random. It's your mother's maiden name. I've found it to be an effective way to trace family lineage considering record keeping in the hinterlands of the Philippine highlands may not have been particularly fastidious.
Along with a first, middle, and last, more than likely you'll receive another name alongside your first, creating a double first name. Being a very Catholic country, this meant a lot of girls were christened "Mary". This didn't seem to carry over to boys, as I personally don't know many Filipinos named Joseph. My full legal name is Gregory Wayne Comicho Capuyan, taking the Gregory from Dad. My parents, probably hoping to stave off the confusion of two Gregs in the house, had me go by Wayne.
Sharing a name with Dad still caused confusion. Periodically during his lifetime and immediately after his death, I received mail intended for him. Because "Gregory" is my legal name, certain institutions still balk when I identify myself as Wayne. One medical office almost canceled my appointment because my insurance card used "Gregory", but I signed all documents as "Wayne".
I'm actually not sure of how "Gregory" came to be associated with Dad's family. It wasn't his father's name, and I don't know of any other "Gregory" on either side of Dad's family. I think that's actually pretty cool - it's another unique bond he and I share. As for where "Wayne" came from, the family story goes that John Wayne was one of the family's favorite actors.
Before the birth of his son, my buddy Trevor asked me if there were any negative connotations in the tech world about IXP. I thought for a moment. "IXP? No. But Novell uses IPX. It's a networking protocol. Why?" He explained one of the contenders for his son's middle name was Xavier, and he didn't want to saddle his son with goofy initials.
This is a valid concern. In the '70s sitcom, All In the Family", Archie's first grandson was to be named for his two grandfathers with the other grandfather's name being Steven. Archie being Archie, argued for his name to be first, but his daughter wisely pointed out, "Oh, Daddy, you don't want your grandson to have those initials." Her married name was Stivic.
My high school classmate, Lisa, is a true southern belle with just the right amount of redneck (really, Lisa, it's a compliment). When her daughter, Marley, was born, she and her husband went all-in on the southern tradition of monogrammed everything. It turns out little Miss Marley Fraser had the most badass towels in the neighborhood.
It's not just family history and careful analysis of resulting initials that factor into naming a child. Current events and pop culture hold their sway, too (hence the "Wayne" in my name). Sometimes those influences last for generations. When was the last time you met anyone named Adolf? The pervasiveness or scarcity of a given name in any generation is a good gauge of who or what was hot in pop culture at the time. It's why we're up to our armpits in Brittneys and why I fully expect that one of these days I'm going to meet a Khaleesi.
Back in 2017, the staff at Babygaga tried to gently put up guard rails for parents considering the pop culture scene for their pool of baby names. Number 1 on their list were the protagonists in John Mellencamp's 1982 release and only #1 hit.
It seems Mellencamp himself could have used the site's guidance. Those in the know will remember when, on the advice of his manager, he went by Johnny Cougar. This was shortened to John Cougar. Along the way, he tacked on his last name and was known as John Cougar Mellencamp. He eventually ditched the "Cougar" altogether and wound up back with the name originally gifted to him by his parents.
Here's a well-known logic exercise. How would you describe a man with no hair on his head? The obvious adjective is bald. Easy enough.
How then would you describe a man with a single hair on his head? Does this still meet the criteria for being bald? Most would say yes. What if he had two hairs on his head? Or even three? At what point does the addition of a single hair revoke the man's membership in the Cue Ball Club?
People can generally scan a man's coiffure or lack thereof and instantly classify him as bald, balding, or even having the start of a receding hairline. Humans can take in these subtle nuances and not be thrown by them. We recognize a sliding scale and aren't constrained to bald / not bald.
Computers, on the other hand, having printed circuit boards and CPUs instead of grey matter, do not have this innate ability. In the digital world, everything is either on or off, yes or no, up or down. A programmer's job is to bridge this logic divide and encode instructions that satisfy the binary nature of a computer but still allow human operators to do useful work.
My introduction to programming was in college and the experience was literally the same as learning a foreign language. While I did well in Spanish, FORTRAN was a very different animal.
Professor: Boolean operators are used to parse the contents of both matrices to find common values.
Me: ¿Queue?
Instructions encoded in a specific computer language must conform to a very rigid style sheet, or syntax, in order for it to be successfully understood, or compiled, by the computer. You may have thought your college English professor was tough, but program compilers show absolutely no mercy.
One of the early jobs my high school classmate, Henry, had was with a firm whose sole business was the retirement of nuclear reactors. His team was tasked with recompiling the entirety of the company's custom code in order to be Y2K compliant. After a week or so of failing to get a specific subroutine to compile, Henry took it to one of the staff gurus hoping for some insight. After scanning Henry's syntax for a moment, he exclaimed, "Oh, yeah. You're missing a comma in this line."
Even if you've rigorously followed all the inflexible rules of syntax and compiled your program without errors, you're still not guaranteed a win. While your syntax may be perfect, your machine logic may be flawed. A computer will dutifully execute a successfully compiled program based on its logic, not yours.
A story I picked up years ago involved a programmer coding a flight simulator for an attack helicopter operating in the Australian outback. His task was to recreate how kangaroos would naturally scatter as the helicopter approached. Rather than start from scratch, he reused an existing subroutine written for the reaction of enemy soldiers on the ground. Basically, he did a cut and paste throughout the program, replacing all instances of "bad guy" with "cute kangaroo".
At first, his logic held. Running the simulation, the former "bad guys" now sporting their "cute kangaroo" avatars expectedly scattered in all directions as the helicopter closed on their position. However, while the programmer changed their label and look, he didn't change their hard-coded nature. After scattering, the kangaroos found cover and started firing on the helicopter.
A thought process known as "fuzzy logic" has been around for decades. It seeks to close the binary logic gap and allow an infinite set of values between 0 and 1. Being able to successfully implement this into a computer's operating system is critical to the present and future success of AI. It's yet to be determined if AI will give rise to a dystopian future a la Terminator, but it's already benefitted us tremendously in fields of science, medicine, economics, and even music.
With its subtleties of whole and half steps, meter, tonal dissonance and release, music is truly a complex human construct. Yet some smart cookies out there have already figured out how to distill these intricacies down to an AI program capable of generating original compositions.
This is a piece by AIVA, an artificial intelligence cranking out some interesting riffs. I'm curious how it would handle the question of baldness posed at the start of this missive.
Sun Tzu, a Chinese philosopher, general, and strategist born around 544 BC is recognized as the author behind the seminal treatise, The Art of War. This ancient text of military strategy is still highly regarded in the world's military academies and has served as the model and inspiration for many modern works. Sun Tzu's philosophy can clearly be seen in the contemporary text, Warfighting, written as an exposition of the US Marine Corps' warfighting strategy.
In a logical progression, tenets from The Art of War have also been redressed and released as a guide for business leaders. Simply replace "General" with "CEO" in the manuscript and you have a very good manual on how to handle close order combat in the boardroom.
The wisdom of Sun Tzu's teachings can be subtle.
"He who knows both himself and his enemy need not fear the result of a hundred battles."
He placed a lot of stress on spycraft, feints, and misdirection.
"Appear strong when you are weak and appear weak when you are strong."
And his words still ring true today.
"There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare."
One of the most well-known stories about Sun Tzu happened during his tenure as a general in the service of King Wu. To validate Sun Tzu's credentials, the king ordered the general to train his retinue of concubines in military drill. Surprising the king, and with absolutely zero f*cks given, Sun Tzu agreed with the proviso that he would have full control of the training and that the king could not interfere.
The ladies were divided into two groups, each headed by one of the king's favorite concubines. Sun Tzu faced the two formations of women and loudly and slowly explained how to perform a basic military drill command. Upon completion of this tutorial, he brought them to attention and shouted, "Right face!" Both cadres broke down into laughter, faces hidden by spread, fluttering fans. Nonplussed, Sun Tzu waited for the giggles to die down and declared, "If an order is given, and troops fail to implement the order, the fault lies with the commander for being unclear in his expectations."
He patiently gave overly detailed instructions on how to complete the basic command and again shouted, "Right face!" Once more, the ladies just stood, giggling behind their fans, and, once more, Sun Tzu declared, "If an order is given, and troops fail to implement the order, the fault lies with the commander for being unclear in his expectations." But he continued, "However, if the commander has been clear with his instructions and his expectations, the fault lies with the field commanders." He then ordered the execution of the king's two favored concubines.
Horrified, the king protested, but Sun Tzu waved him off, reminding him that he ceded his authority for the duration of the training exercise. The executions were carried out and new "field commanders" were appointed. Sufficiently sobered as to the seriousness of their positions, the two cadres performed flawlessly.
A multitude of lessons can be unpacked here.
• Leaders at every level in an organization must be accountable for mission success - and failure.
• In the very fluid theater of war, tactical decisions on the battlefield should reside with commanders on the ground, not armchair commanders half a world away.
• Those in positions of authority in the downtown office or in an operational theater on another continent should not be flippant with their most important assets - their people.
Perhaps most importantly, it's an admonition to not impart fools' errands to grizzled old guys with absolutely zero f*cks to give.
