Monday, Monday

Chaos happens all the time everywhere, from that drip in your faucet to the number of deer dropping by the deer shed on their way to the dinner table.  If you clap your hands right now (do it) you are changing the weather on the upcoming Fourth of July.  The trouble is though that you can't control it by clapping louder or longer.  It will be different but you don't know in which way or what way it would have been if you hadn't clapped.  

It doesn't make any difference in that it doesn't cure cancer or put a couple more horse power under the hood of that honkin Ford truck,  it's interesting to know.  Some people complain about the expense of those deep space probes that shadow the moons of Uranus, because what difference does it make to your daily life?  Knowing that Miranda, the fifth largest moon has chevrons?  Nothing, but nice to know.

I never knew that there was a Miranda, (the daughter of Prospero from The Tempest), until just this morning, and I feel good about myself for the advance in my literary and planetary knowledge.

Damn I am sure there are plenty of youtubes about Miranda.  Oh yeah a ton of them.   Well there would go my morning if I went out a roving.  I have to go along with Old Dog in that they are amazing,  I particularly did like that Veritasium that apparently is a fave of Old Dog.  What are these youtube shortcuts that you speak of?

I certainly agree with Old Dog on the silver screen.  But the last movie I saw on the silver screen was Little Women (a review I read previously said that it was a movie men would hate and women would love, and I thought I am a sensitive enlightened man so I could probably enjoy it too, but it was so fucking stupid.  Maybe I should youtube Gloria Steinem, well maybe not today), and I like the dark you have to stumble through and the frigid air and the booming sound, but it does not make up for pausing to get a brewski and take a pee and refresh my supply of wasabi almonds.

Cashless, oh I don't like that.  I love the crumpled bills and the clinking coins.  I got into the habit of using the card even for small purchases during the pandemic, and now I find it hard to break.  I guess it is convenient and all, just shoving the card into the little machine and not having to go through your wallet, maybe your pockets for change and then putting away the change you get, but it just seems more grounded, more real.

I have written to the editor several times in my life getting accepted and rejected, and I accept that as the way the world goes, but when I write an exceptionally fine letter which goes into the dust bin in favor of some semi literate screed, well it's too much to bear.

I just sent an email to get it to the editor.  I guess there is something to be said for the cash purchase, for the ritual of finding an envelope, buying a stamp, and walking out to a mailbox, but really it is just too much.  

Maybe now I'll take just a little peek at those Miranda youtubes.  Chevrons you say?

Variables

The math is way over my head, but I think I can grasp the general concept.  One problem that immediately presents itself is that this system only works in an enclosed environment where all the variables are under control, which seldom happens in the real world.  Still, I find it a little comforting to know that there are people out there trying to make sense out of the mysterious workings of our universe.  

Wednesday, all is well

I think I may be dipping down that rabbit hole more often in the future.

Be careful, you never know where you'll end up, or when.  The hours can fly by before you know it.  That was a good link but I didn't find any reference to that guy Hoppensteadt that you mentioned.  The other videos in the series look good and I was amused to see your link to the Veritasium channel, a long time subscription of mine.  It's a very strange coincidence that we may have been viewing the same video on the same day.

Those math channels with their colorful animations can make me loopy, especially the ones showing pendulum patterns.  Hypnotic, but maybe not in a good way if they are accompanied by music.  Avoid them unless you have a lot of time to kill.  A final suggestion: investigate the many YouTube shortcuts to make your experience more pleasurable.

-----

Which he ascribes to Thelonious Monk,...

Which I didn't but hinted at but never mind, my memory of his quote was way off.  What he actually said was “Everything’s happening, all the time.”  Not too close as to what I remembered but this could be a fine example of the Mandela Effect, again.  And one of the newly Oscar nominated films doesn't help at all: Everything Everywhere All at Once.  I started watching it the other day for about ten minutes to get a taste and it didn't grab me.  I'll pick up on it again, sooner or later; movies don't captivate me the way they used to.  Maybe it's the environment; nothing beats watching a spectacle on the big silver screen with an audience instead of at home on a TV screen with less than ideal audio.

I used to enjoy going to the cinema but my local place has been remodeled and gotten a bit too highbrow for my liking.  I can live with the higher ticket prices if the movie is decent but they have also gone cashless.  I don't know how that process is implemented but I don't like it, not one bit.  If they expect me to use a smart phone or credit card to buy a movie ticket, popcorn, and Raisinets they are out of their minds.  It's like those restaurants that don't have menus but expect you to scan a QR code and go online to see what's available.  Those waitresses get confused when you pay with cash and have change coming, poor babies.

-----

Kudos to Uncle Ken, the newly published author!  Did you actually write something and mail it to the paper?  I've never written to a newspaper, thinking I'd end up in the big pile labeled "cranks."  Keep it up, maybe I'll start reading a daily newspaper again.

chaos theory and youtube

 To me chaos is more math than it is physics, though of course all matter follows the rules of mathematics.  The point being that sometimes (like in turbulence) the world acts kind of crazy like, and when they try to figure out what is going on it turns out that the math, that staid science of accountants, is what is driving the crazy.

I liked that pool table where the guy moved one of the balls just a scooch and eventually the path of the cue ball was completely different.  If you watch it carefully, the paths are the same until the moved ball gets in on the action when it is hit by another ball and even then nothing changes until those balls hit other balls and eventually one of them hits the cue ball.  

After the video ended I noticed that there was a part two, and that are actually nine of them.  Along the way I noticed this other video being suggested.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovJcsL7vyrk

This one lacks the fancy, but sometimes distracting, graphics of the first series but it begins with an exploration of the math behind the changing populations of rabbits which is not unlike that of deer.  This is the part of chaos theory that fascinates me, how the line splits in two, then four, then eight and on and then goes to chaos, but then a little further down the x axis it goes back to being a single line again, then splits and begins to alternate between chaos and order in a wacky pattern.

When I came back from Texas to my parents' attic, and I had no job and no money and no friends, I did have my PC Jr and I wrote up a program in BASIC to duplicate that graph and everytime I saw that ascending line break into two then four etc it felt like the finger of god chucking me under the chin.

Anyway while I was looking at these videos, I came across this other one.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=094y1Z2wpJg

Has nothing to do with chaos, but fascinating.

Old Dog is a fan of youtube as are many of my friends, but I never liked videos because in a book when you get confused you can always go back a few pages and reread to make things clear.  But in youtube you can do that by just clicking on the line.  I think I may be dipping down that rabbit hole more often in the future.

What Exactly is Chaos?

I have come across mention of chaos theory from time to time, and they seemed to be talking about something different each time.  This time, chaos theory sounds a lot like regular old-fashioned physics to me.  So, what exactly is chaos?

more rabbit holes

 In an earlier post I was talking about reading that Gleick chaos book, and I still am.  It is still sitting on the bathroom shelf being regularly read in accordance with my regularity.

And then Old Dog wrote:  everything changes all the time, everywhere, and nothing is constant. 

Which he ascribes to Thelonious Monk, and well he might have said it but such sentiments were first spoken according to our records by Heraclitus around 500 BC.  I believe that there was another Greek about that time he was saying that nothing ever changes, but you know philosophers.

Anyway I was being regular this morning and came across this fellow Hoppensteadt and it turns out he did a couple films (videos) on the subject, so I went to Old Dog's favorite rabbit hole, and found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0gDLEHbYCk

which illustrates one of the fundamental ideas of chaos in a clever way, also mentioning Heraclitus.  It's maybe a bit too glossy, and meanders a bit but once you get to about six minutes it delivers.  

I would like to submit it to my associates and hear their responses if they are in a mood to respond.

Happy weekend Gentleman

Uncle Ken hits the big time.

 

Sent this in to the Sun-Times about a week ago, but never heard anything so I assumed they had rejected it, but opened up the paper this morning to find this.

rabbit holes

 To use a phrase that Old Dog is fond of, I am not going to go down the Stones/Beatles rabbit hole this morning.  Well maybe a little.  I am aware that the Stones came from a crust upper than that from which the Beatles sprung.  I reckon their greaser look is because they were rockers to the Stones' mods.  I remember early on during the British invasion reading an article about the Stones and it casually mentioned them lighting up cigarettes, and I was like wow. I suddenly realized that I had never seen a rock and roller smoke a cig before.  I always liked the Stones better, not because of their talking about Street Fighting but their sound was heavier, closer to the blues, while the Beatles often seemed a little flighty.

I did indeed write part of that blog, save it, then add to it later.  I guess I should have just started a new post, but well I always think everybody is reading the blog in the morning as I am.

I too have wifi, but for the sake of expediency I am plugged directly into the modem from RCN and it is much faster.  Why not add one cord more to the spaghetti behind my tv and computer?  

You know it kind of reminds me of the difference between apes and the other mammals in that our spine goes right up from our butts, but then just before it hits the brain it does a ninety degree turn from vertical to horizontal and this gives that stream of info a pause, likely slowing it down so that we may pick through it for what is important and what is not.  Other mammals on the other hand, having chosen to stay grounded on four feet, get the blast straight from their spine without having it slowed down and that's why my cat sometimes goes bat shit crazy.  I haven't put this theory up for scientific debate, but as Beagles is fond of saying, that has never stopped me before.

Funny that Old Dog mentions fractals.  I just pulled my dogeared copy of Gleick's Chaos Making a new Science, from my bookshelf and moved it to the bathroom where it will get a rereading as regularly as I am regular.  

I used to be a fractals groupie, I read my hardcover Mandelbrot and maybe a dozen more books, some a little scholarly but others with their slick central pages blasted with colors and very odd shapes upstaging the text, math porn.  

All that chaos stuff reminds us that we aren't crazy, the universe is, and the universe is crazy because those nice solid predictable numbers marching from one to infinity, well not infinity, just a case where whatever number you can think of there is always a number that is larger, infinity is just, well you just can't speak of it because that would be like Satan's name being spoken aloud and that allows Satan to show up in person and then everything goes to hell.

But even without infinity, if you stray not too far from oh, multiplication and division you are in the land of chaos.

Okay now that is a rabbit hole, and the more I speak of it the less I know what I am saying.  Speaking of which:

but there are differences between those clowns, not easily discernable.  The clowns, like many humans, will say one thing in public, another thing to fellow clowns, still another to their nearest and dearest and finally, their truest thoughts and beliefs known only to them and carried to the grave.  

They are not separate from us.  They are us.  People like to think of themselves as that phrase that Beagles and many of his ilk use when portraying any clown that walks into a gun store: law-abiding citizens.  Just John Q Public trying to feed his family while thieving politicians are stealing him blind.  But they are are of the same cloth as us.  

Well maybe not.  I remember a boss I had when I worked for the state and if you didn't know him well you just thought of him as an affable guy, easy to get along with, quick with a joke, albeit usually a lame one.  But as you got to know him you noticed there was always a slight pause before he responded to what you said to him.  

You know like if I said isn't it a nice day, you would likely respond sure, or maybe if you were in a mood or of a thoughtful state of mind you might reply, not all that nice.

But Dennis, I will call him that because that was his name, would be thinking what is the best response I can give to advance my cause, in the case of say, me, to get more work out of me.

Hmm, if I say sure is that will kind of set him at ease, maybe getting him to day dream about the carefree days of his youth when a job was the furthest thing from his mind, and maybe he will pause and look out the window, and that will cut into time when he should be working.

If on the other hand I say not all that nice, and just for kicks add one of those inscrutable looks of which I am a master, that might unsettle him a bit, not unlike the way chaos unsettles square, law-abiding, numbers, and get him to worrying a bit about his job security and that way I will get more work out of him.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

See this was what I was thinking of when I asked the dawgs about being in the military and mostly they just responded with talk of rank titles and chevrons, but I was wondering about the power differential.

Dennis had power over my paycheck so I was a moderately boss-abiding citizen, but if worse came to worse I could always tell him to fuck off and walk out the door.  I would lose that fat paycheck but I would also be free of any power he had over me.

But if a grunt soldier said fuck off to the sarge or the looie (had to look that up), or why not, the general, he could get into deep shit.  I reckon not as bad as the old days when whipping was always just around the corner, but couldn't any of those guys ask you to drop down and give him five or ten?  

I don't imagine they would very often, but just the knowledge that they could, was that different from having a regular job and being in the army now?

That is what I was wondering.

And speaking of rabbit holes, remember this guy?

It seems like he was all over editorial pages when I was a kid, but you almost never see him anymore.  

The term John Q. Public was the name of a character created by Vaughn Shoemaker, an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News, in 1922

How about that? A hometown guy.  

Oh I almost forgot.  What about that tomato?  Did that come from the tomato plant you were growing inside.  Kudus for the Gentleman Scientist.  I would never have thought you could get fruit from an indoor plant.  Can we get photos?  And how about the mangoes?

Sunday the 15th

I was wrong

I don't think so; perhaps you spoke too quickly.  As I see it, you made a prediction which, in this case, is nothing more than an educated guess based on the information you had at the time.  It isn't like you said the sky was green or the tree in your backyard was a thousand feet tall.  You're dealing with a faction of clowns in the political circus you enjoy following but there are differences between those clowns, not easily discernable.  The clowns, like many humans, will say one thing in public, another thing to fellow clowns, still another to their nearest and dearest and finally, their truest thoughts and beliefs known only to them and carried to the grave.  The circus is entertaining, I know, but I still say "follow the money."

-----

As for speaking too quickly, I do it a lot myself and wander off topic.  For instance, my comment about the Beatles and Stones which had nothing to do with the main idea of the Beatles selling out.  I should have asked what you meant by that since their band broke up more than fifty years ago but the Stones are still touring, going strong.

These damn rabbit holes are starting to remind me of fractals, like those videos on YouTube where you zoom in on Mandelbrot sets.  You think you have it figured out but then more details are revealed and you fall further and further down the hole.  Too bad that I seldom know when to stop and pull back, maybe to find another hole to dive into.

-----

Meanwhile, here's a freshly picked tomato.  Tasty!

Friday the 13th

Ah them Beatles, sell outs if you asked me.  I was a Stones guy, Street Fighting Man, now there is the real stuff.

I don't think so.  The image of the Stones was created by their manager to contrast with the Beatles in their nice suits.  But as the Stones were getting together in their tidy middle class London environment the Beatles were playing in Hamburg, four hours a night in the dodgy bars of the Red-Light district.  Check out their greasy haircuts and black leather; a tough bunch, if you ask me and they paid their dues.  And they were young, John Lennon was 20 and George Harrison was 16 or 17.  When Brian Epstein became their manager he cleaned them up and the rest is history.

-----

Sometimes I wonder if I'm losing my marbles or if Uncle Ken is playing with his Blogger posts.  I could have sworn that his post of last Thursday was originally half the length of the final version.  It seemed that his post was incomplete and fizzled out when I first read it but a later reading had all kinds of extra stuff, veering into the political realm.  Was that post amended with extra content?  I didn't copy and save the original post as is my usual habit so maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.

-----

Very quiet in the Institute lately, even Uncle Ken has slowed down his posting.  I don't mind; blogs can have a life of their own as they ebb and flow or even fade away and die.  This fits in with one of my crackpot philosophical notions, that everything changes all the time, everywhere, and nothing is constant.  Maybe Thelonious Monk said something like that originally, maybe not.  We can fight the changes or go with the flow but I think we can make ourselves very miserable and end up beating our heads against the wall when things don't happen the way we want them.  But this is as far down that rabbit hole I'm going today.  I'll let the pundits, politicos, and other yahoos yammer and try to make themselves relevant in their own reality.  They are not my people, whether they are red, blue, or purple.  Ooops!  Another rabbit hole!

-----

I don't know how you guys are hooked up to the internet but I've been doing the WiFi thing with my router and the results haven't been good lately.  My old (10+ years) laptop seemed to be slowing down, even with my dandy fiber-optic connection.  And because I sometimes don't see something when it's right in front of me I let it go until I ran some tests on the connection.  There are real-time online speed tests that you can run and my machine was "very slow" and should have been much better.  But when I tested the connection from the server it was blazing fast, the fault was with my WiFi connection.  The solution was simple, connect the laptop to the router with an ethernet cable.  Easy peasy, as they say, and I didn't have to do anything;  the laptop recognized the connection and now the internet  is crazy fast, so fast that I've been watching a lot of movies at 1080p, which is kind of high definition.  Too many movies, some might say but who cares what people say?  If you're looking for a quirky Christmas movie the next holiday season I recommend Violent Night.  It's a hoot and makes me want to believe in Santa Claus again.

I was wrong

 Well I thought those votes would go on until spring, but I came home after an evening of gemutlichkeit and deep examination of the ways of the world, and McCarthy was one vote from victory.  Holy shit, what was happening?  There was near fisticuffs, a phone call from Donald Trump, and now they were reversing their vote for adjournment, and now, pretty sure that it was Gaetz, was changing his vote to present and then it was over.

The insurrection was over.  The guy who defeated the insurrection was a guy who has nothing bad to say about the Jan 6 insurrection, on behalf of the majority who want to do nothing more than to stop the investigation into Jan 6, and to form a committee to investigate those who were doing the investigation.

I say defeated the insurrection, but actually he bowed down to all their demands and broke himself down like a shotgun for them.  All it will take is just one nutball from The Twenty, or from any nutball, even a Democrat I believe, and we are counting votes all over again.  Actually I am not exactly sure how that all works.  The house still has to ratify those rules and we'll see how that goes.  Things look pretty quiet this morning.  Maybe too quiet.

I know the dawgs are not that much interested in politics, especially all the little inside baseball details, but it was on my mind all week, and when something is on your mind and you have a blog, even one that only two other people read, you might as well put it all on the blog.  

And I ended the previous post predicting that those votes would go on indefinitely, and then they ended that very evening, and I wanted to acknowledge that I was wrong.  It's important to acknowledge that you are wrong because it is like atoning for a sin and now you have a clean slate and you can cruise around with your head held high until you get something wrong again.  

Insurrectionists

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out (in)

Ah them Beatles, sell outs if you asked me.  I was a Stones guy, Street Fighting Man, now there is the real stuff.  Not that I ever did any street fighting, lest I got pounded in the noggin.  Well I did get charged with assault with a deadly weapon during the Berkeley People's Park riots, but I just went out to see the sights and the cops decided let's pick up these two dingbats because why the fuck not. 

In 1968, the first presidential election I was allowed to vote, I didn't want to vote for Humphrey against Nixon, because Humphrey was a sell out, dump the Hump, now there's the stuff.  In Berkeley at the time The Revolution was a question of not if but when.

But in 1972 I had done my CO work and the draft was behind me and that great anti war guy George McGovern had won the nomination.  Some of my more radical comrades (beer-drinking buddies that were into vandalism and looting) did not want to stain themselves by hanging with Democrats, but I wanted to give this guy a chance.  He lost in a landslide but I have been a Democrat ever since.

Ford, Reagan, Carter, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2. two parties, two trains running down opposite tracks.  I hated it when the reps won, those bastards, reveled when my party won because that meant the electorate had seen the light, though often they lost it at the next election, but all in all it was a system you know.  

But then at the end of Bush 2's term the tea party reared its head.  Oh the dems always had that lefty fringe and the reps their righty fringe, but both those fringes seemed interested mostly in pushing their parties to the left or the right, but there was something different about the tea partiers.  They didn't want to reform the republicans they wanted to overthrow it.  Even though the party had been there before them, they called the old guards RINOs.  They were insurrectionists.

Oh it's not like they fired a cannon down Main Street, they mostly just brought those tri-cornered hats and knee bridges back into fashion. They claimed to be against politics AND big business but they were funded by big  business.  Disturbing rhetoric, but it was mostly rhetoric.  

Eight years of Obama, my candidate if hope were followed by four years of The Beast.

 somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

At first the old guard of the G.O.P. were thrilled, look at the votes, those crazed crowds, those dark thoughts from the back of their minds that they dare not speak lest it mean trouble, why he was bellowing them and his polls just went higher.  

Here was a tiger that they could ride to get more tax cuts for the rich and pack the supreme court with young right wing Christians who would be there years into the future.  But they couldn't control him at all.  The barbarians they welcomed into their empire were beginning to take control of the empire.  They were unapologetic Qanon-ers, out and out racists, nazis, paramilitary groups with strange names, they had no interest in institutions, principles, fairness.  They were insurrectionists, the Grand Old Party was the party of insurrection.  

Still Mitch and his crowd bailed him out of two impeachments, they had too, lest the hated dems returned to power.  But they returned to power anyway.  That whole insurrectionist thing so newly popular with the G.O.P, was not that popular with the rest of the country.

When they couldn't win by votes they attempted to take by force.  They were insurrectionists just as me and my friends were so many years ago.  But we were young and idealistic and they were much older and more enraged, we loved the press wanting to use it to spread our message of peace and love, they beat up reporters.  We marched, they attacked.

After bailing them out on the two impeachments, the regular reps, RINOs if you will, stood up strong, this is not the kind of behavior the party of Lincoln does not condones.  But within a few days they realized that the inmates were running the asylum and fell into line.  Here is a little quote I got from reading an article on McCarthy:

Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist, told me, “The Dems’ extreme people are extreme on progressive policies. The Republicans’ extreme are extreme on the level of the insane taking over the asylum.”

My party swept the election, presidency, senate, house.  We were poised on the edge of doing Great Things, but then we ran into Coal Joe Manchin.  That bastard.

Meanwhile the party of insurrection seethed, became wilder in their accusations.  Just wait till we win they sneered, we will investigate everybody we don't like from Faucci to Hunter and that guy at immigration whose name nobody can remember.  They allowed Trump to name his own candidates for senator, so that instead of retaking the senate they lost one seat.

And the house, which they were assuming they would take by like forty seats, they took by four, and this takes us to the current situation.

Three days of it and by all sights many more to come.  In this corner McCrazy, a longtime Trump toady, who will give up anything to be speaker.  But in the other corner, The Nineteen who, remember that bastard Coal Joe, why he is a genial uncle with a heart in the right place compared to these guys.  Insurrectionists.  Twenty nuts out of four hundred, who are like the asshole in that joke.

One day the body parts got tired of being ordered around by the brain and decided to elect a new leader.  The muscles thought that they should rule, because they were the strongest.  The stomach thought it should rule because it provided the fuel.  The heart thought it should rule because it brought the blood to every cell.  And way down there the asshole thought it should rule.  

Why you, the other body parts asked, what the hell do you do?  I'll show you, said the asshole.  And while for the next few days the other body parts argued, the asshole, well, did nothing.  The shit piled up, and piled up, and piled up, and eventually the other body parts couldn't stand it and gave up and made the asshole the boss.

And this proves that if you want to be the boss you don't have to be the strongest, you don't have to provide fuel, you don't have to pump life-giving blood.  You just have to be an asshole.

On the border kids are not being put into cages, Hunter Biden is skating, uninvestigated, and these guys don't care.  Not a bit.  They could spend of their lives sitting in that room making speeches about how important debating democracy is, and that would be just fine with them.

McCrazy has spent much of his life waiting to grasp that gavel, and even though it is obvious he can never win, he is more than willing to die trying.  They are insurrecting.

The other republicans don't want to give up to The Nineteen because they want to prove that the asshole cannot rule the body, though clearly it can.

Nancy Pelosi, she just grins like that Cheshire cat.

Welcome to 2023

We didn't make it to Petoskey for Christmas.

What a coincidence!  I didn't make it to my sister's place because of some Covid nonsense.  My niece went to London with some of her pals and one of them tested positive on her return.  My niece is fine but my sister was spooked because her hubby has health issues, some Covid related, and she didn't want to take any chances.  Fine with me and I'm glad she has her priorities straight.  We were still able to exchange gifts, etc., and hang out a bit but not as a big group.  Sister felt bad about it but I told her about some of my favorite Christmas Eves, sitting in a bar in Miami or hanging out with my fellow goofballs overseas.  No shopping, no presents to speak of, and no gatherings of extended family to argue with.  This Christmas was like a return to those stress-free days of yesteryear.  Maybe it can be a new tradition.

-----

The Army must have fiddled with the rank insignia after Mr. Beagles did his ETS.  When I was in, Private E2s had a single stripe (chevron) and PFCs had a chevron with a rocker.  Otherwise it was the same, with E4 Specialists having the bird and the E5s having the bird with the umbrella (to keep the shit from falling on you).  Specialist ranks used to go all the way up to E7 or 8, I think, but the highest I saw was a Spec6.  And I read recently that the highest Specialist rank is now E4; my former rank of Spec5 is extinct  but so is my former MOS, 83D20 (Process Photographer).  A lot of job titles got wiped out once that Asian war cooled off.  No doubt the new wars have new job titles to go with the new toys they are playing with.

-----

That's where I learned the fine art of malingering...

Ain't that the truth, and it is a skill that has served me well.  When in doubt, grab a broom (or mop or shovel or tool or box or anything, really) and walk purposefully somewhere else.  Looking busy has the same effect as being busy.  In retrospect, there are a lot of good life skills that I picked up in the Army but I was too bone-headed to realize it at the time.  Maybe in my next life I'll re-enlist.