The Cuckoo’s Egg, Part II

While the technical derring-do of Cliff Stoll’s year-long effort to catch whomever was trolling around academic and government computers in the late 1980s is fascinating on its own, what I found most illuminating in Stoll’s book, “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” is how he was able to overcome his qualms of working for and with The Man in his quest to find out who was messing with things and who caused that 75-cent error in Livermore Berkeley Lab’s accounting.

I’ll repeat, first, a quote from yesterday’s blog post, wherein he sums up his reasons for working with the likes of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and others:

All my buddying up with spooks in suits and playing computer cop came from my appreciation for creative anarchy. To have the networks as our playground, we have to preserve our sense of trust; to do that, we have to take it seriously when people break that trust.

I’m saddened to find talented programmers devoting their time to breaking into computers. Instead of developing new ways to help each other, vandals make viruses and logic bombs. The result? People blame every software quirk on viruses, public-domain software lies underused, and our networks become sources of paranoia.

Fears for security really do louse up the free flow of information. Science and social progress only take place in the open. The paranoia that hackers leave in their wake only stifles our work . . . forcing administrators to disconnect our links to networked communities.

I admit I’m curious to know if Stoll’s attitude has changed in the intervening years, what with revelations now that the spooks he worked with worked for entities which have been spying on Americans as well as those they’re supposed to be spying on – and that things like, you know, Guantanamo Bay and waterboarding and such have happened.

But what I do think is that the paranoia he feared, in a great sense, has come to pass. And that paranoia has led to the acceptance of things such as Guantanamo Bay – because the only thing paranoia produces is more paranoia. It’s hard to be rational and to step back and see how close one is to the abyss when paranoia is pushing you from behind, demanding swift action.

Trust me, I know a lot about paranoia. It’s kind of a family hobby, likely born in the pogroms in Russia and reproduced generations later after traveling across three continents.

Here’s a peek at what the paranoia looks like. (Warning, language.) And it’s not limited to one school of thought or one political party. It’s everywhere.

And it might be true that the paranoia’s always been there – but that the Internet is making it easy to broadcast, find, assimilate, commingle, and FREAK ALL THE WAY OUT about. And some of it is worth freaking all the way out about it, because we’re not only aware of the NSA peeking at our every communication, but corporations and advertisers and politicians and everyone else who thinks there’s an advantage to doing so is doing so, echoing the mantra “Well, since X is doing it, so can we.”

And we let them. For the most part. Oh, we get wound up. But we don’t quit.

Fixing things is tricky. We have presidential candidates urging Big Tech to “do something” to stem the flow of disinformation. But do we want to give that power to Big Tech? There’s the distinct possibility that “disinformation” could be defined so broadly by Big Tech or by government urging Big Tech to act that free speech gets trampled, or only certain disinformation is disallowed. We have on one hand people complaining that social media knows too much about us – and it seems these same hands want to hand social media censorious powers at the same time they complain. And remember, censoring others is just fine – it’s just when they censor *you* that things have gone awry. 

Then try answering the question “Quis custodiet Ipsos custodes?” With the few minor brushes with social media censors that I’ve experienced, there is no recourse. No chance to explain a misunderstood joke, or a joke or phrase taken out of context. You’re at the mercy of censors who don’t have to answer to you. Or pretty much anyone.

Ethical Dilemma Case Study: Cliff Stoll

“We’re the good guys, Marty.”

Who, we might ask, are the good guys?

Cliff Stoll, an astronomer and early computer adopter, asks that question in his book “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” where he tells his tale of meandering through the offices and mentalities of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and other civilian and military entities tied to the federal government as he tries to figure out why there’s a 75 cent accounting error related to computer use at the Livermore Berkeley Lab in California.

All I have to do is say the name “Berkeley” and we conjure up a vision of hippies, anarchists, free spirits and free thinkers who would just as soon blow up puppies and kittens for sport than help the spies and soldiers in the federal government track down a computer hacker.

But he does help them and catches flack for it from his free-spirited compatriots in California.
Clearly an ethical dilemma. But here’s how he states it:

All my buddying up with spooks in suits and playing computer cop came from my appreciation for creative anarchy. To have the networks as our playground, we have to preserve our sense of trust; to do that, we have to take it seriously when people break that trust.

I’m saddened to find talented programmers devoting their time to breaking into computers. Instead of developing new ways to help each other, vandals make viruses and logic bombs. The result? People blame every software quirk on viruses, public-domain software lies underused, and our networks become sources of paranoia.

Fears for security really do louse up the free flow of information. Science and social progress only take place in the open. The paranoia that hackers leave in their wake only stifles our work . . . forcing administrators to disconnect our links to networked communities.

Stoll tells his story in “The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking A Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage,” a book published in 1989, when the internet we know today didn’t exist and only universities, the government, and the military had networked computers. I’m old enough to remember the heady days of the early 1990s when as a student, I got my first email address and spent my first time perusing the internet. I even created a few websites, which, thanks to the Wayback Machine, can still be visited.

For what it’s worth, we have moved into a more secure and more paranoid internet, much as Stoll predicted. I work for a government contractor and am told our network undergoes thousands of break-in attempts a day. We’re regularly tested on our ability to recognize and ignore attempts to phish for personal information and for ways to break into that network, and we’re just involved in the cleanup of nuclear waste. We are the good guys.

But we see how far we’ve come, and sometimes wonder at what we’ve given up.

I built those foolish websites of my own by hand, learning HTML by looking at how other web pages built their stuff. I don’t do that anymore – I rely on others to do that work for me for free, at Facebook and at Google (owner of Blogger.com, where my personal blog resides). But what have I given up for the low-cost, little-work entry into the internet? Privacy. I’m a commodity. People other than me make money off the silly stuff I put on the web.

I’ve had my credit card information stolen three times (thanks, in all three cases, to iTunes, thank you very much Apple). I’ve been banned from Facebook for the space of 24 hours for using the term “white trash” in a joking manner. A fellow I know in Arizona, a former LDS bishop who writes an inspiring weekly blog, cannot post links to his blog on Facebook anymore because those hostile to the church ganged up and got Facebook to give him the boot, saying his stuff doesn’t meet Facebook’s “community standards.”

Maybe we’re more secure. But we’re giving up a lot. Associate with the wrong person, and you’re unpersonned, to borrow a word from George Orwell. Today, we call it “cancelled,” or “cancel culture.” Orwell predicted it. And it’s happening.

Ethical Dilemma Case Study: Christopher Thomas Knight

Ironically the week we look at ethical dilemmas in the English 301 class I'm teaching this semester, I start reading Michael Finkel’s book “The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit,” which focuses on the life of Christopher Thomas Knight, a man who lived for more than 25 years on his own, in the woods, using food and supplies he stole from nearby cabins and a summer camp for disabled children.

(If you haven’t read the book but want to, warning: Spoilers ahead.)

Finkel opens his book with the story of Knight’s last burglary at Pine Tree Camp, the night he’s caught by fish and game officer Terry Hughes, thus:

The hermit zigzags across the camp and stops at a specific rock, turns it over, brags the key hidden beneath, and pockets it for later use. Then he climbs a slope to the parking lot and tests each vehicle’s doors. A Ford pickup opens. He clicks on his pen-light and peeks inside.

Candy! Always good. Ten rolls of Smarties, tossed in the cup holders. He stuffs them in another pocket. He also takes a rain poncho, unopened in its packaging, and a silver-colored Armitron analog watch. It’s not an expensive watch – if it looks valuable, the hermit will not steal it. He has a moral code. But extra watches are important; when you live outside with rain and snow, breakage is inevitable.

The hermit has a moral code. He steals, but nothing valuable. His thefts – he estimates he committed more than a thousand burglaries in the time he spent living in a clearing in the tangled woods not far from his boyhood home in Albion, Maine – small things for the most part, things people would be embarrassed to contact the police about: D-cell batteries. Packaged food. Used books. The occasional pair of jeans or a sleeping bag. He stole mattresses and propane tanks and portable radios. He stole hand-held gaming systems, but never anything that looked new – he didn’t want to steal any kid’s new birthday or Christmas toy – and figured he’d steal them in a few years when the newness was worn off a bit.

He admits, Finkel writes, that with every theft, he felt a burning shame.

But he stole to live.

Thus the dilemma.

Victor Hugo, famously, wrote an entire book about such a dilemma: A man sent to prison for the crime of stealing bread to feed his family.

What to do?

I’m still reading the book. When I finish, I’ll share any ethical discussion that comes of it. But my preliminary conclusion: It’s hard to be good.

Also this:

Thank You, Mister Jones

With the passing of Terry Jones, I find my thoughts wandering through Monty Python but settling on Ripping Yarns.

Now I’m a big Python fan. But Ripping Yarns. More subtle humor – as satire often is.

And maybe it’s because I connect Ripping Yarns, specifically the episode “The Testing of Eric Olthwaite” with my Dad, who loved how boring Eric was and how obsessed he was with shovels.

And whenever I’m feeling excited, I say this, from Eric: “It were hard to accept I were boring. Especially with my interest in rainfall.”

I just love the absurdity and imagine what fun it must have been to write and produce such stuff. The British, I’m thankful, have a long love for the absurd. I’m not sure this kind of absurdity could get made in the United States nowadays. Maybe earlier. And maybe not even in England now. But for what it was, when it was made, it was glorious to behold.

Also, Ripping Yarns fed my need to identify obscure character actors in different roles. Thanks to this, I got to see Denholm Elliott, David Griffin, and Roy Kinnear in places I didn’t expect them.

Then there was the time I recognized HIM as the obscure character actor.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes

During the Second World War, an American woman figures out how to sweep the globe of undercover Nazis. The proof was on paper: Four thousand typed decryptions of clandestine Nazi messages that her team shared with the global intelligence community. She had conquered at least forty-eight different clandestine radio circuits and three Enigma machines to get these plaintexts. The pages found their way to the navy and to the army. To FBI headquarters in Washington and bureaus around the world. To Britain. There was no mistaking their origin. Each sheet said “CG Decryption” at the bottom, in black ink. These pieces of paper saved lives. They almost certainly stopped coups. They put fascist spies in prison. They drove wedges between Germany and other nations that were trying to sustain and prolong Nazi terror. By any measure, Elisebeth was a great heroine of the Second World War.

The British knew it. The navy knew it. The FBI knew it. But the American public never did, because Elizebeth wasn’t allowed to speak. She and every other codebreaker who worked on ULTRA material was bound by oath to keep the ULTRA secret. Even if she had been free to discuss her triumphs, explaining them to the public would have taken some time.

J. Edgar Hoover did not have these constraints. His power allowed him to manipulate the press and disclose secrets without consequence. And because his agents were old-school detectives, not technical wizards like Elizebeth, Hoover was able to frame the Invisible War in terms of instantly familiar images: disappearing inks, saboteurs, hidden cameras, police raids on clandestine radio stations, gumshoes in snap-brim hats.

So this was the picture of the spy hunt that the public ended up receiving. They got Hoover’s story, not Elizebeth’s.

A fascinating story, this. Not because a woman – or a man – did it. But because humans, using papers, pencils, and their brains – and then later on, computers with vacuum tubes and punch cards – to break codes meant to be unbreakable.

In a way it reminds me of John Hersey’s “The Child Buyer,” where genius children are seized and used only for their brains’ computing power. Such thoughts are unthinkable these days, not because government is any less insidious, but because computers have beaten the human mind in the fairy tale world of Sorting Things Out.

The closest I come to this is sorting crossword puzzles.

Jason Fagone’s story is a good one on group dynamics as well as the ability to stretch one’s brains. He shows Elizebeth and her husband William, and then both working with different, small groups to sort problems out. When she was forced to work alone, or put in a position where working alone was preferable, she noted there was something missing. Though we generally put down group work, she showed how, with the right group working on the right project, working together is preferable.

I also appreciate how Fagone tells this tale without the golly-bob-howdy a WOMAN did this. He just tells her story.

Did you *READ* It?

All politics, they say, is local.

Eitan Hersh adds to that: All politics is action, not words. And that action occurs a lot more than at the polls.

Hersh, an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, writing for The Atlantic, argues that those who read about politics and discuss politics but don’t act by getting involved in their local community through volunteer work with a political bent to actually make things better are nothing more than political hobbyists who do more harm than good.

These hobbyists, he writes, “scroll through their news feeds, keeping up on all the dramatic turns in Washington that satiate their need for an emotional connection to politics but that help them not at all how to be good citizens. They can recite the ins and outs of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation or fondly recall old 24-hour scandals such as Sharpiegate, but they haven’t the faintest idea how to push for what they care about in their own communities.”

Even worse, Hersh argues “hobbyism also cultivates skills and attitudes that are counterproductive to building power. Rather than practicing patience and empathy . . . to win over supporters . . . hobbyists cultivate outrage and seek instant gratification.”

I see this on the local level – and even in myself. The local Republican Central Committee, the real power-brokers in a heavily Republican area, are the ones running the show. They nominate do-nothing candidates who fit their ideal for state politicians, and support candidates who make lip service to putting more power in local hands until those local hands enact laws they don’t agree with, then they want to take that power back to Boise. But what they’re doing that I’m not is getting involved. They’re doing a lot more than reading highfalutin’ stuff at The Atlantic and blogging about it.

What’s the threshold that pushes a hobbyist into real activism? I haven’t found it in myself yet. Too much else going on, I’ve got to admit. And I get the distinct feeling that if I were to go to the central committee, they’d smell a RINO and run me outta Dodge.

Hersh does point out the difference he sees between the hobbyists and those affecting real change is those who get things done are in the trenches wit those who need help – they’re actively helping fill out paperwork, advocate for language services, and other things. Not just sitting around uttering things like “the government ought to do this or that to help.” They’re actually helping.

I’d be curious to read Hirsch’s book and see what he advises in this arena of finding ways to engage. and then I’d revel in the irony.

He does say this at the end of the article:

College-educated hobbyists can engage in real politics, too. They’ll need to figure out what needs are unmet and how they can serve them. They’ll need to find local organizations in which they can serve. More fundamentally, they’ll have to figure out which communities they’re willing to fight for. As things stand, their apathy suggests that they already have figured that part out.

"A Heavy Tax Shall Be Levied . . . "

There be times I evaluate what I use social media for. Here’s what I come up with:

1. Putting random stuff out there to amuse myself.
2. Putting random stuff out there to amuse specific people.
3. Staying in touch with family and friends.
4. Just putting random stuff out there.
5. Sometimes reading and reacting to the news, mostly local.

I primarily use Facebook, because that’s where the people are. I have a personal blog. And a Twitter account I remember I have when Goodreads reminds me of the option to post stuff to my Twitter.

Yes, I have a Goodreads account. And a YouTube account. But I don’t look at them as social media. Goodreads, I post book reviews. I might once in a blue moon read one from someone else. But not often. And YouTube I use almost exclusively as a consumer of old bits from Top Gear, random movies, Dry Bar Comedy, and old music. I rarely post anything there, comments or content.

What would my world look like if I had to pay for it all?

Well. I could text to stay in touch with family, to be sure. And there are other sources of local news. I used to have my own website back in the early days of the Internet, cobbled together with random stuff, book reviews, original writing and such, much like the blog I have today.

Would I pay for any of the social media I use?

I suppose. If the price point were low enough.

Do I think everyone having to pay to use social media would better the social media environment? Hardly. There are lots of people out there with deeper pockets than mine who’d still post the trash we complain about, from naughty pictures to fake news. Put the price high enough and I guess I don’t get to see any of that (not that I seek it out).

But I read an argument today in favor of paying for social media use, and I remain unconvinced paying for it would do anything to make the Internet a better place.

First of all – would social media companies use my money as a substitution for money they’re getting from folks who want to monetize social media customers and what they post and what they buy and what they fart around doing online? Not hardly. My local grocery store could hope to increase its profits by offering a wider variety of organic, non-GMO products, but they’re not going to give up the money they can get from people who buy “cheez” in cans and subsist on pizza rolls. And if they do, there are plenty of other places to buy junk food. Why should social media companies be any different?

Second, customers paying for stuff doesn’t suddenly make companies noble and better behaved. There are plenty of companies out there which indulge in rotten behavior – banks come to mind, considering the 2008 crash; automobile companies like Volkswagen lie about emissions; the list is endless – and customers give these companies gobs of money. And there appears to be plenty of regulation there too. Money spent on monitoring and monetizing social media users can just as easily be spent on bribing politicians.

Third, would the bad actors simply pay and continue their nefarious mischief? “If we paid for our social media presence,” the author writes, “outrage would simultaneously cease being as cheap to us and as valuable to others. How many trolls, shit-posters, and troglodytes could we shake simply by forcing them to jump a paywall?”

Well, a few impoverished ones like me would probably quit. But the professionals? And those willing to pay a little for a larff? They’d still be there, in numbers. How high a premium would have to be set to kill the shitposters? Probably high enough to kill any value in social media for those who want to use it to post random funnies, communicate with family, and read the local news.

Best yet, the author of this piece calls for a “progressive tax” on social media ad revenue. To what end? To get social media companies to accept less advertising, which any dumb user can usually block with browser-based ad blocking services? Levying taxes doesn’t suddenly convince a company to surrender a revenue stream; this flies in the face of the “marginalize legaluana” movements that say, “Hey, legalize it, tax it, and we’ll suddenly have magical unicorns spewing money at every school.” And who gets the tax money, and for what purpose? The government? Boy, we sure know the government doesn’t dabble in mass surveillance nor waste its money on stupid things. That tax would probably be spent on more unicorns.

Spending less time on social media, that would be the thing. Or fooling around on it with family and friends, not paying much attention to the argle-bargle and garbage that’s out there (note my scant use of Twitter; that’s my crap-avoidance strategy). But that’s not as easily done as putting up paywalls and levying taxes, so why write about that?

Now I don’t give these tech behemoths a pass. They do a lot of naughty stuff. But. So do people who charge their customers for the privilege. Taking the democratizing effect of social media away is still a high price to pay.

I wonder how the author would have felt if Quillette wanted him to pay to post his article?

An Excess of Certainty

Though this article in The Atlantic looks at the concept of political bias in social media through the lens of the recent elections in the United Kingdom (and focuses primarily on Twitter), what writer Helen Lewis has to say is important for any election, any electoral system, and any journalists or pundits or rank amateur political jibber-jabberers out there, whether from the left or not.

Twitter and its most active users, Lewis argues, exercise “outsize power to shape the political conversation.” Pretty sure we saw this when the left was shocked – shocked, mind you – to see Donald Trump win over Hillary Clinton in 2016. And it’s bound to happen again to the Democrats’ candidate running against Trump in 2020, no matter he’s an impeached president now.

I won’t re-hash all of her arguments and evidence here, but I will hit on the highlights:

1. Labour activists in the UK were convinced, listening to the Twitter Echo Chamber, Lewis says, that their party was going to win the general election, when in fact Boris Johnson’s conservatives handed them their worst defeat in almost a century.

2. The “echo chamber of social media reassures those extreme voices that they are in fact the mainstream.”

3. Freudian “narcissism of small differences” and legal scholar Cass Sunstein’s “group polarization” encourages divides even among like-minded individuals (and we’re seeing this locally, with the far right controlling the local Republican Central Committee and pushing far-right candidates, most of the time winning. This is all fueled by an “excess of certainty” that says even in defeat, “my side” certainly didn’t lose.

4. The opinions most commonly represented in mainstream outlets (Lewis says progressive outlets, but it works on both sides of the spectrum) are not held by the masses, including by the groups seemingly with the most at stake.

5. Far left progressive views, while not held by the mainstream, are shared by elite journalists. So the skew in politics enters into journalism. And this explains Fox News – only they skew to the right.

So, what are the lessons for the Weenie Man, such as I?



Don’t get all of your politic slop from social media. Or elite journalists. Think for yourself. Dammit.

Up the Down Staircase, Finally

I’ve read Bel Kaufman’s “Up the Down Staircase” a number of times, and this time, this finally hit me:

And Ferone – where is he and what is to become of him?

I wonder how he himself will tell it, or recall it. “I had this teacher, see, and once, on a winter afternoon . . .”

I keep remembering what he had said to me. “What makes you think you’re so special? Just because you’re a teacher?” What he was really saying was: You are so special. You are my teacher. Then teach me, help me. Hey, teach, I’m lost – which way do I go? I’m tired of going up the down staircase.

So am I.

This comes near the end of the novel, where student Joseph Ferone, reprobate, deadbeat student, but intellectually on par with the best, tries to kiss his English teacher.

Was he looking for love?

In a confused way, confused by the image of love brought on by pop culture, even then a dire influence, moreso now, yes. Yes he was looking for love, and asked for it in the way he’d been taught how.

Yet again, going up the down staircase.

Much earlier in the novel, a student is disciplined for just that – the physical act of going up a staircase that was designated only for students going down – a crowd control measure. But Kaufman uses the phrase and concept as a metaphor to see how helpless – and possibly not helpless – she and her fellow teachers could be to help those students caught going the wrong direction.

Romanticized? Probably. But Kaufman is no fool. There is no happy ending here. Joseph Ferone disappears, likely never to return, going up the same down staircase he tried to escape in his confusion.

So what does this mean for me? I teach, both at home with my kids, at Scouts with others, and at the college level in English. Have I done anything in the past several years to help anyone going up the down staircase?

Maybe.

And this doesn’t mean blind conformity – it means finding positive direction in their lives, whether they conform to what I think is positive or not. There are many up or down staircases that arrive at many different locations. That they are making progress in the right direction is the thing.

And again, this is why I re-read books. You never know how long it’s going to take before the main point smacks you in the head with its delicate little hammer.

Blog Alzheimers

Over the past twelve years or so, I have demonstrated on this blog – and its ancillary blogs – that I have a lot of time on my hands.

Folks were wowed by my witty commentary on The Cokesbury Party Blog, where I shared modern japery on the japes of yore.

They thrilled anew when I targeted my simpering wit at the Treasury of Laughter, a collection of humor some of which survives to this day.

But when visiting those sites now, they feel a little moth-eaten.

Not because my wit is off-point, no! But because many of the links – particularly of the embedded YouTube video variety – have gone to seed, taking readers to the most mundane of places*:

I have had the occasional thought: I should go through my blogs one by one, correcting the bloggy Alzheimer’s by finding new versions of the linked material. But then I think, “Wow, that would mean I *really* have a lot of time on my hands. And it’s likely with the passage of more time, the updated links would suffer the same fate.

Besides, some of the missing links on these blogs may seem easy to replace – there are a thousand options out there for Stupid Sexy Flanders – but some of them are a bit more obscure (like Hee-Haw), and I give no hints to their content in the accompanying text. So the best I could do was guess.

Perhaps, I say to myself, when YouTube is between its frenzied action of countermanding browser YouTube downloaders, I could download the videos I link to and then have them permanently on the blog. And open myself up to copyright trouble. No, better to have Google shoulder that burden, and put up with the dead links.

So the first option is better. But it’s a clear time sink. What to do?

Blog about it, for one. And then very likely do nothing about it.

What gaps there are in my blogs may well turn out to be like the gaps in our knowledge about ancient languages or hieroglyphics. Or of no consequence because they could disappear in an instant and the world would continue on its merry way.

*Excluding any of my blogs, that is.

Squogging the Simps

The Internet – like alliances during world wars – makes for strange bedfellows.

Here is such an example. Today, I’m defending someone I wouldn’t otherwise even think about: Kylie Jenner.

I don’t know much about her outside of assuming with the Jenner name she’s tied in with the Kardashian clan. She’s attractive, and probably makes her money with makeup or whatever else the hell that vapid group of simps does for money.

Despite my wording, I do say defend, because of this.

Yes, it’s totally useless to post a photo of yourself with a cliched, pseudo-inspirational message below it. But it’s not far from the uselessness I put on my own social media accounts, viz:

She dared use the word “fire” as inspiration.

Cue the even simpier, who dogpiled her on the internet, inferring that her use of the word “fire” and her posing in front of a fireplace is “insensitive” to those in Australia dealing with a record level of destructive wildfires.

Please.

Vapidity like this gets me fired up. I’m on fire with rage, and other fire-related wordplay.

I don’t want to live in a world where we have to be so hyperaware of what’s going on globally that we have to avoid using certain words and imagery – even cliched words and imagery – lest we offend.

And let’s face it, were the simpiers piling on her really offended, or were they just looking for an excuse to pile?

I think the latter.

EARWAX!

On the 28th of December, 2019, I went lap swimming with my kids. Trying to lose some flab, trying to encourage our youngest to exercise more in a way he finds enjoyable.

Ended up getting – or so I thought – water in my ear.

Couldn’t shake it out.

But we’re in Taint – the period between Christmas and New Years, when nobody’s working. So I didn’t think to call the doctor. Went swimming again on the 31st, still with the ear blockage. Thought maybe the presence of water would encourage the ear to release what it was holding.

But nothing.

Tried the over-the-counter earwax stuff. It percolated a bit in the ear, but nothing. Still partially deaf. But by then I knew it wasn’t just water in the ear. Figured it’s probably earwax – thus the earwax stuff. Could be an infection, but there wasn’t any associated pain or fever.

Back to work on Thursday, January 2nd. Figured by then maybe the doctor’s office would be open and I could get in the following week. Called and they had an appointment for 8:45 the next morning. Took it. I need to get a physical done for Scouts anyway, and there’s a $100 bonus in the offing (if I remember right) if we get our cholesterol checked this year. The bonus comes from the insurance company. Weird.

Dr. Merzlock confirmed, after a gentle probing, that I did have “quite a wall” of earwax in there. So after the chest x-ray, the EKG, the bloodletting (almost passed out during that; should have laid down on their couch like last year) they hosed the ears out, after first putting in their own ear drops.

Amazing. Cleaned me out with what felt like a fire hose. I could tell instantly the problem was fixed, as I could HEAR the water gushing in and gushing out. The collection cup for the left ear looked like it was holding stew. Right ear, some gunk, but not so much.

So I can hear again. But my ear canal and such were tender in both ears for most of the weekend. And they let me keep the cleaning-out syringe, so I can self-doctor myself the next time this occurs.

Actually looking forward to getting an ear blocked now.

This is how a middle-aged guy starts 2020, folks.