It has caused quite an uproar and has had political ramifications as the left and right trade accusations. The right says war is a nasty, dirty business and that the left should realize that in war bad things are done, while the left says that war scars its participants, and that’s why they do bad things.

One of the big problems is that we in America are suffering from what I like to call “The Tom Clancy Syndrome.” His books in the 1980s and 1990s presented a highly skilled and competent military. After the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the stock of the military soared in the minds of many people, and there’s an ongoing belief that people in uniform can do no wrong.

This is quite a contrast from the past – especially when I was in 30 years ago – when the military was seen as bad in terms of having a career and in terms of being a neighbor.

After Vietnam, the armed forces were in disarray and for years afterward they were in “rebuilding” mode. Even in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the military was not seen as a viable career for an ambitious man with just a high school diploma, and even the officer corps was not considered all that positively. Thanks to a long era of peace, the military was able to rebuild itself and its reputation until, by Sept. 11, 2001, it was nearly worshipped by all.

After that date, well, it has existed in the glow of good feelings and nearly unlimited budgets.

The reality with the urination incident is that in war, sometimes young people are stressed to the limit and they do stupid things. I was an aviation electrician in an attack squadron in the Marines, and we were a tight-knit group. Had we captured an enemy who had attacked, injured or killed a buddy, there’s no telling what we might have done to him, up to and including killing that person.

It would have been wrong to kill him because he might have intelligence information that could help our cause, but I doubt that would have stopped us. And yes, we might even have urinated on his dead body. That doesn’t make it right. That’s war.

I hope these Marines aren’t subjected to the full force of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for something that was decidedly bad judgment, but hardly an atrocity considering everything else that goes on in war. We get the sanitized version, for the most part, from the press and all, so when something real comes through, we’re shocked.

As George Tecumseh Sherman once said, “War is hell.”

Doctors have found more tumors on Gary Carter’s brain. It makes me so sad.

There was a time when Gary Carter was a dreaded batter. He was a catcher, and one of the game’s greatest, and he wore the uniform of the now-gone Montreal Expos. That bat was a holy terror, though.

One of the greatest joys in my life was when the Mets traded to get Gary Carter. Here was an experienced catcher needed to handle Mets pitchers and a dangerous power hitter who could turn the game around with a swing of the mighty bat. In 1985, the ownership of the Mets had some hot players coming up from the farm system, but was not averse to a trade or two to make things work. Another great player they obtained – one of the greatest Mets players ever, in my view – was Keith Hernandez. But that’s for another posting.

Mets fans had some cause for optimism as the 1984 season ended. Players like Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry showed great promise, Hubie Brooks (who was traded for Gary Carter) and Mookie Wilson were proving to be greats in their own right, and every player seemed to be ready for a great season in 1985.

When the Mets traded for Hernandez, then signed him to a long-term contract, and landed Carter, it really hit home. The ownership was serious. They really wanted the Mets to contend. It wasn’t about next year. It was this year.

Gary Carter set the tone for 1985. In his first game in the orange and blue, on April 9, 1985, at Shea Stadium against the St. Louis Cardinals in the 10th inning of a tie game, he crushed a game-winning home run into the left-field bullpen on Opening Day. I still remember the call, and the announcer saying, “Welcome to New York, Gary Carter.”

Those were the days. He was young and great, and beloved in a city that could be cruel to athletes. That big swing was now on the side of the good guys, and went to work dismantling National League pitching. Behind the plate, he was the master of defense with an arm that could make a runner think twice about trying to steal.

Rounding third and trying to score on the Mets? Good luck getting past Gary Carter.

Under manager Davey Johnson, it looked in 1985 like it was the Mets’ year. Despite a 26-7 drubbing at the hands of the Phillies, the Mets plowed through their schedule, winning mostly, losing occasionally, but always in the running. Still, the St. Louis Cardinals were the team to beat, despite having traded the great Keith Hernandez to the Mets the previous year. The Mets won 98 games that year.

It may have been 26 years ago, but I remember it so well. On October 1-3, 1985, with the Mets three games back, it all came down to a three-game series in St. Louis. A sweep of the Cardinals would put the Mets in a tie. One loss, and the Mets would be out of the running, barring a miracle.

The first game in St. Louis was a nail-biter until Darryl Strawberry crushed a homer in the 11th inning off the façade in right field. The Mets won that game, and the next one.

But they lost the third game, and returned to New York for the final series of the season. I wanted to cry.

But the Mets’ fans then were not ready to give up, and cheered their team and its great players, including Gary Carter. They’d given us thrills galore in 1985. “Wait till next year” wasn’t just a cliché in 1985. The season ended with the Mets so close but so far away.

It was 1986 that was the year when it all came together, and Gary Carter was in the thick of it all. He was a leader on the field and the Mets achieved their first World Series win since 1969, with Carter delivering a key single in the bottom of the 10th inning of game six against the Boston Red Sox. The Mets were down, and seemingly out. With two out and the Mets down by two runs, he got a hit, advanced to second base on another hit, then scored on Ray Knight’s single. Soon the great Mookie Wilson stood in and fought his way through a series of pitches that included one that got past the catcher, causing the tying run to score.

Wilson fought off and fouled off a series of brutal 3-2 pitches as the tension built and built, then finally topped a ball to first base. Bill Buckner missed the ball, the winning run, Ray Knight, raced around to score, and the Mets were alive again.

In game seven, the Mets fell behind early but came back, eventually winning that game and the World Series.

The Mets couldn’t have done it without Gary Carter. And knowing that we may soon be saying goodbye to him just hurts beyond measure. You can’t even find that great home run on YouTube, the one that turned Opening Day 1985 into a stunning win.

I want only to think about that when I think about Gary Carter. He was a great player, a great Met and, more importantly, he is a great man.

Addendum: I was just thinking that I may have videotapes of some of Gary Carter’s great moments. In addition to having the “Let’s Go Mets” video, I also have the 25th anniversary video. I believe that the latter has Carter’s homer on Opening Day 1985 and Strawberry’s shot in St. Louis. I’ll check my storage unit next week and report back. I have no way of transferring those clips to the web, and it’s probably a copyright violation in any case.

Addendum 2: You can see the “Let’s Go Mets” video online at this site. This includes the “Making of …” featurette. At the end of the song, you see two angles of Carter’s Opening Day homer, though not the actual at-bat itself. One shows the swing, and the other shows him punching the air and rounding first. He was so young, energetic and alive then.

In any case, of late I’ve been doing a lot of reading. In addition to recently finishing Stephen King’s novel “11/22/63,” I’ve been downloading library books on my Kindle and passing them to my laptop. I’ve also been nosing around in my complete New York Times DVD archive of front pages (up to 2008).

My other favorite places to explore the past are my DVDs of the complete Rolling Stone magazine archive (up to 2007) and The Complete New Yorker DVDs.

Though print is far from dead, I am worried because at some point, everything will be virtual and online, and then where will people find out what the big news was? The permanence of print comes to the fore when you read the front page of the Times (or any other newspaper) for Dec. 8, 1941. The newsmagazines of the time also had intense coverage of World War II, and not in what I call “History Channel time” but in the real time as people lived it.

In the New Yorker, I watched the war unfold, with information and misinformation alike in its pages. After the shock of the attack on Pearl and the Japanese offensive through the Pacific, including the fall of the Philippines, people were frustrated. Why weren’t we hitting back at the Japanese? After Germany declared war, why weren’t we hitting back at Germany?

The reality was that it took time to crank up industry and get it moving toward war production. People were needed to serve in the military and work in the factories, and it took time to get them set up and organized. It may seem that the men who filled the recruiting stations on Dec. 8 set off immediately for training, but that’s not true, I read once. Military camps and bases had to be built, training cadres organized and civilian educational facilities converted for military training use.

I learned all about that reading the media of the time. It’s amazing that much of it is online or in electronic format now, so the technology that will kill print helps to preserve past printed material for interested folks like me to learn.

But when print is finally supplanted, how will people know what was the big story, or even the little story? More fascinating than the big war news of battles are the little stories of life that never get into those documentaries about the home front in the war. But they’re there in the magazines of the time, if you’re patient enough to find them.

Maybe someone will preserve the websites that we’re generating like mad to keep people informed. I hope so. Eighty years from now, I’ll be gone but I hope some of my work will be preserved online, so others can see the perspectives of this age, and not filtered through a popular source like the History Channel.

The odd thing was that I had a good job, was working 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and was still having zero success with women. I had been talked into a long-distance relationship with a woman in Nelson, British Columbia, and was coming back several days early from my trip out there. She had disappointed me, I had disappointed her, and she decided to get me out of there early.

It was a long plane ride, and I thought through most of it of what needed to be done.

At home, with the cats and me back in my little house in Lake Worth, I began to initiate my plans. I withdrew from clubs and groups that weren’t offering me anything, stopped talking to some people, and rethought my life from top to bottom. It was a scary but refreshing process and while it didn’t generate any romantic success (I’m still alone, and will be for the rest of my life) it was refreshing to have such a major change.

Soon, I’d embark on more changes that would blast me out of my comfort zone and into career success and new challenges.

I’ve been thinking lately that it’s time for some radical changes again, and the process began with my decision to move back to my house in Ellenton. But some more change is needed, and I’ve decided that a few people have become a bit complacent about me.

It’s nothing very extreme, but I’ve noticed some folks talking to me with less respect than before. I don’t believe in talking to anyone as if they’re a 7-year-old, but some people seem to believe that I’m 7 years old and mentally deficient, and a few have been dealt with already.

Not by outright confrontation. One benefit of life today is you can be subtle about it all (and then write about it for all the world to see). Say you’ve treated someone a certain way and gotten away with a lot of verbal stuff. Suddenly, that person becomes harder to contact. Phone calls go unanswered or unreturned. Email isn’t answered. Comments on blog posts are rejected and deleted.

It’s probably the best way all around, I’m thinking. There’s no howling, screaming, no accusations, etc. You just block that person out and go on with life.

How can you tell if it’s time to make the changes?

• The harder you work, the more someone complains.

• Every day starts to feel like you’re cranking up a “happiness machine” – an ongoing effort to make others happy – and no one’s happy with you or your efforts.

• You get blamed for things, not because you did anything wrong, but because you are conveniently present when the problems are noticed.

• You get long lectures on the failings of your political party or its elected representatives.

• Your career is basically thrown in your face, and you’re lectured on how your career field is the reason everything is wrong in America, and somehow you’re responsible for working in it.

• You wonder if people would love you at all if you were a drug addict or criminal in prison, because they sure as hell don’t appreciate you now when you’re doing everything right.

• When you do make mistakes, they’re hurled in your face publicly.

I read in a book once about assertiveness that the important thing to remember is that it’s your life, not someone else’s and especially not a deity’s. Of course, suicide is not a valid option, but you have the right to make reasonable and intelligent choices about where to live, where to work and what to believe, and others’ input should be advisory and only given if requested, not imposed.

I have made my decisions, and acted upon my choices.

That is final, and I will brook no further discussion on my life and my choices. Everyone else has had their say. And now I’ve had mine.

I threw out a ton of stuff, the accumulation of four years of living at the same address. Old electronics, including the first TV I bought in Florida, went to technology recycling. I’d bought a 19-inch set in 1986 and it sat on its stand, unused, for years in various houses I’d lived in.

It and a whole bunch of stuff went away that day of technology recycling in Manatee County. I gave books to Goodwill, but kept almost all the others. Of course, I kept my 42-inch and 27-inch TV sets, my bookcases, my computers and much more.

Now that I’m planning on moving back to my house in Ellenton sometime in late February, I’ve begun packing. The books have sat on their shelves for two years, and now they’re back in boxes and in the storage unit I’ve rented for all of this time. I have another case of books to pack, and then there are the two spare computers and my electronic keyboard and accessories.

If you can believe it, I’ve unpacked the keyboard twice and packed it away. Now I plan on doing it again, maybe at the end of January. I might even use it before I pack it up.

One big job was hauling all those boxes of books to the storage unit. I bought a large hand truck and took the boxes, three at a time, down the two flights of stairs and loaded them in the car’s trunk, back seat and put three boxes around the front passenger’s seat to balance the car. When I was done, my Chevy Cruze Eco’s rear was pretty darn low.

At the storage unit, I rearranged the place as best I could, then unloaded all the boxes from the car. The car felt a lot lighter and handled a bit better after that.

There are going to be more trips down the stairs with the hand truck, and I’ve laid in a supply of tape and even more boxes.

One thing is for sure: I am looking forward to being able to walk into my house again, using my own key, and sleeping in my master bedroom with the cats.

In Gainesville, of late, walking in my area was never that much fun of an experience, and you couldn’t do much walking at night because of the neighborhood. During the day, it could also be a hassle due to the large trucks, people running red lights and more that happen when you mix pedestrians and vehicles.

In Covered Bridge in Ellenton, the interior roads are not perfect for walking, just very, very, very good.

The big problem in Gainesville is that they’ve caught downtown dress-up fever, and that means that to create a “walkable” community, it has to be “unwalkable” for months while the brick pavers are installed. In addition to the need to block the sidewalk, installation of the pavers requires very loud equipment to cut the bricks to shape them just so, which means lots of noise so you can’t hear podcasts or music, and lots of dust and crossing the street to avoid being hit by a car.

Projects to remake an area also can be hazardous to the health of the businesses already there. The infamous Main Street project in Gainesville turned the road into an obstacle course and killed a number of businesses before it was finally finished.

Back in the 1990s, I remember that the U.S. 1 improvement project through Boca Raton nearly wiped out the business district. When it becomes too hard to drive into a parking lot for a business, people vote with their feet.

My favorite catastrophe brought about by a redevelopment plan happened in a private strip mall area, though. Back in the late 1990s, I was working as a copy editor for an outfit called Bankrate.com, and our offices were across the street from a plaza that had parking outside, and a ring of storefronts facing inward. You parked – or crossed U.S. 1 – and entered through an opening in the ring.

On my first visit, I found a place to eat and it was OK, but a few weeks later, it was like entering Hades. The owner had decided to spruce the place up and had chosen an Italian look. This meant brick pavers and lots of other work, and the ringed-in area was full of construction workers engaged in all the activities associated with cutting bricks and other activities that seemed to involve lots of noise and dust. The workers also smoked incessantly.

The air was dense with brick dust, the noise of the brick cutters was brutal, and the parking lot was filled with construction vehicles. Business owners were gathering together to complain that they were being ruined by the noise, dust and more. Men with leaf blowers fanned out at times to blow the dust into the air.

“This is killing my business,” one woman business owner shouted to another over the howling racket.

The eateries closed down eventually, killed by the access difficulties and the fact that you couldn’t have a quiet conversation in the restaurants. When the work was finally done, the plaza looked really nice, but it was deserted.

Most downtown redevelopment schemes I’ve seen seem to work at cross-purposes, mainly because the people often don’t know what they want.

For example, suburbanites like myself are used to the easy availability of parking spaces. Bringing us to places where you might have to drive around and look for a spot, then parallel park on a busy road, can be a challenge. Throw in the fact that suburban shopping places offer free and reasonably parking, and the downtown areas invariably try to charge for parking or levy fines for overstaying an arbitrary limit, and you have a recipe for disaster as people come to downtown for the amenities, then must watch the clock and leave early to avoid a parking ticket or towing.

There has to be a middle ground somewhere.

One interesting thing about walking is that I could walk another route, but it’s far less interesting and also annoying. Employees of Shands Hospital congregate and often block the sidewalk because they can smoke on the sidewalk, and it can be a pain to have to dodge smokers and hold your breath while you walk.

Plus, my favorite route includes the university, and the view is always great.

Back in the day, life was pretty simple. You bought a TV, hooked up an outside antenna and the world came through to you. Cable TV was for mountainous areas and other remote places where the over-the-air signals were just too weak for good reception. Sometimes in the city, you could pick up distant stations, especially on the UHF channels, but mostly you stuck to your local tried and true stations.

The rise of CNN and other stations on cable made cable service almost a necessity, though, and the advent of “must carry” rules meant that local stations were on the system, too. I still remember that at the Boca Raton News we had cable on the TV in the sports department, but had to pick up the local channels, including the Super Bowl, on rabbit ears. It was fuzzy, but it worked.

Everywhere you moved to, job one was getting cable hooked up. You had to pay their price and take their packages, bringing in a ton of channels you didn’t plan on watching just to get your favorites.

With a VCR, you could time shift and record shows for later viewing. In 2005, I bought a TiVo and found a much better way to get my favorite shows. Since I worked nights and weekends, it was a lifesaver and I could follow shows easily and without worrying that I might have forgotten to set the VCR or had run out of tapes.

An effort to cut costs was behind my recent decision to cut the (cable) cord. I was also going to get rid of my telephone landline, a “package” deal, but was advised that to do so and still get Internet, I needed to buy a cable modem for “just” $80. I decided to keep the landline for two more months and continue to use the company’s modem.

Still, I cut $80 off my budget, though I’ll miss some shows.

The thing is, I can still see some of them because they are streamed through the Internet. And the stuff I missed, well, someday I’ll have the money to buy the DVDs.

In the meantime, I’m doing a lot more reading. Losing cable TV was a sacrifice, but I feel I’ve gained a lot more.

Sure, I will find out my future job status, but I am also planning to grab change by the horns, and with luck I won’t end up in the hospital with puncture wounds. What awesome challenge am I, the man who survived Parris Island, the post office and four adoring felines, about to face?

I am going to change my cable service by cutting out TV and telephone, and eliminate my TiVo service.

Downgrading my cable service from TV-Phone-Internet to Internet guarantees me a trip to the section of phone hell called “customer retention.” See, you can increase your services with relative ease, since the cable company gets more of your money. But if you attempt to reduce your services, I know from experience that they will do everything short of threats to first-borns to stop you from committing this terrible offense.

I am girding my loins for the arguments about the terrors of not having even basic cable. How it’s just wrong for me to cancel my landline, even though I can get the same services – and more – for less from a cellphone. And how Internet alone is just wrong, wrong, wrong, though it’s offered.

The folks in retention are trained to act as if they’re financial advisers, warning you of the terrible economic consequences of your plan to cut your service. I will be strong. I will be strong. I WILL BE STRONG.

I will also miss terribly my favorite shows, but can catch some of them on Hulu or other sites. And someday, when my economic status improves, I may be able to again afford the whole magilla, and that will be a glorious day.

Ending TiVo is a bit harder, but must also be done. I feel bad about it. It’s been a part of my life since 2005, and has made watching TV so much better, and time-shifting – an essential part of life when you work nights – a snap. But without cable, there’s no need for TiVo. I can save even more money by dumping it, and can just play back what I’ve recorded already.

There’s a lot of talk about change in the world, but the people in charge like change when they can impose it on those below them. I am imposing change on my betters here, and they had better get used to it.

Charities are finding it to be a rough go. Even after laying off their low-paid staffs, it’s still a challenge to keep going and keep paying their six-figure executives and executive VPs and development directors, let alone carry out their mission, which is usually to help people but ends up being about telemarketing and mailing out begging letters.

In St. Petersburg, Fla., a charity called “Navy Veterans” raised hundreds of millions of dollars through intrusive telemarketing, telling people that members of the Navy were deprived of just about everything in life and that in addition to their taxes going to the military, they needed to donate to Navy Veterans. It all turned out to be a big scam, and the guy at the top of the pile is still MIA, though some of his former underlings at the charity are guests of the government for the next couple of decades.

If you ever served in the military or worked for the Postal Service, you no doubt had to deal with the organized extortion that passed for charity. In fact, the military got the worst of it because not only did you get pitched for the dreaded Combined Federal Campaign, you had to deal with – in the case of the Navy and Marine Corps – Navy Relief.

One of my big memories of being at Naval Air Station Memphis in Millington, Tenn., in late 1978 was not just learning electronics the military way, but enduring the pitches for both charities. In basic training, we were hit up for money for both, but at the naval base after basic training, the hammer came down.

I still remember the day when the officer in charge of our training, a Navy commander, announced that there would be a meeting where an important matter would be discussed. We wondered what it would be: Were we at war? Had something terrible happened to our country? The whole lot of us sat there in our seats as his nibs the commander said to us, “Today, I want to talk to you about something that is so very important. I want to talk to you about … Navy Relief.”

It was like the air was removed from the room. Yet again, we who made $397.50 a month (E-1 pay in 1978) were being subjected to a request on our flimsy paychecks. Usually, people who gave these presentations left the room pissed off at the response. The more cynical among the low-ranked said that Navy Relief was a big scam the officers set up to benefit themselves.

The Combined Federal Campaign was another pain in the ass. I still remember that at the post office every employee had to get a sales pitch from the designated CFC representative while on the clock. I sat down with a female co-worker whose big problem was that she was deaf, and her vocal skills were very rudimentary, but still understandable.

She made the pitch, and I said that I had already made my donations for the year privately. Her response left no ambiguity: “You cheap f—k!”

I got up and walked out of the meeting.

One year, they gave a film presentation, and then the personnel office chief, a really screwed-up woman, said we all ought to give because we were so lucky to have jobs. Very few stayed behind to fill out the forms for donations.

Most of us suspected that CFC participation was part of our bosses’ evaluation and we wanted no part of it if that was the case, or we could give money on our own. No one wanted the Postal Service to get credit for any donations, and especially not the local bosses.

The nonprofit industry has turned into a big deal, especially if you’re a top executive, and it’s inevitable that a large number of the people interviewed in news stories about the poor are top executives for nonprofits, and who themselves will never have to avail themselves of the services they provide for others.

There are plenty of suckers willing to work for nothing at nonprofits, and that’s to the advantage of the top executives, who can continue to pad their resumes and their bank balances. I, for one, have decided to stop donating to nonprofits for this reason. Call me cheap, but charity begins at home, I say.

The winter solstice arrived after midnight Thursday, signaling the shortest day of the year and the beginning of winter, but here in Florida the weather felt more like the first day of autumn. Still, it was “severe clear” all day and as the shadows lengthened around 5 p.m., I could see that it was going to be a great night for astronomy.

This was all supposed to happen in St. Augustine, but a change in “status” led to me setting up my telescope downstairs from the condo. With the new laptop running Stellarium but not controlling the telescope mount, I was ready for darkness. Aligning on the stars was a snap, and soon I was grooving to the wonders of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and even saw one of its companion galaxies (M110) after it got darker.

I also tried a bunch of deep-sky objects, including some open clusters, and had good success with my old friends, the Double Cluster in Perseus.

The planet Jupiter was, as always, radiant, with the four Galilean moons easy to see. The way the planet is aligned with Earth now, the moons circle Jupiter but don’t disappear behind it. Thanks to Stellarium, I was able to see how this was happening, showing why it’s good to have the laptop, even if it’s not moving the telescope.

I also got a look at Uranus, but then finished off the night with M31, then packed it all away. I was done by around 8 p.m. In the summer, sometimes I cannot even get started until 8:30 p.m., so you can see how the time change and the solstice changes the amount of light we have.

It was another successful night, and I’m glad I took the time.