Charles Kimball is Alive and Well

I have been ill for a good part of April. Look for a new episode to go up in the first week of May!

Episode 104: Singapore, Success Despite the Odds

I don’t know if this blog still has any regular readers.  If there are any left, sorry about keeping you waiting on this announcement.  I did upload Episode 104 on the evening of January 1, but shortly after that, the Internet service failed in our house.  Our ISP could not send over a work crew to fix it until the following Monday, so Leive and I were shut out of cyberspace for the whole weekend.  It turned out the fiber optic cable, which had been buried in the backyard in the summer of 2018, had failed, so it was replaced.  Then my birthday came and went, and now I am getting over a minor cold (not COVID, I swear!).

By the way, if you test positive for CORVID, it means you are turning into a crow.

Anyway, the latest episode covers the recent history of Singapore, from 1965 to the present.  Listen to it and enjoy!

https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/72214177/episode-104-singapore-success-despite-the-odds/

 

(Transcript)

This episode is dedicated to the last donors to the podcast for 2020, Philip O. and Christophe M.  Naturally I added your names to the Podcast Hall of Fame page.  Make another donation later on, and you will qualify to have the coveted water buffalo icon next to your names!  A new year is a time for new beginnings, and new opportunities, so may both of you see your paths blessed in 2021, and for that matter, the whole decade of the 2020s.  Now sit back, grab some food, coffee or tea if you wish, and listen to what your donations helped make possible.  If you’re ready to begin, so am I.

Episode 104: Singapore, Success Despite the Odds

Greetings, dear listeners, from the hills of Bluegrass country in Kentucky!  If you are listening to this around the time I recorded this episode, we finally have 2020 behind us, so Happy New Year!

<Applause>

Of course I don’t know what the new year will bring, but I will be optimistic.  Right now I am imagining a restaurant somewhere that is open to in-person dining, and not under a COVID-19 lockdown.  There a waiter brings a wine bottle that says on the label, “2021.”  One of the guests sitting at the table says, “I have not tried it before, but it just HAS to be better than the awful slop in the last bottle!”

<Laughs>

But I know you didn’t turn on this podcast just for laughs.  You’re here for the latest episode on Southeast Asia’s recent history.  Today we are going to look at the richest country in present-day Southeast Asia, the city-state of Singapore!  The last time we talked about Singapore, we got as far as the year 1965, and because there aren’t any wars to talk about in the fifty-five years since then, I believe we will finish with Singapore today, going all the way to the present!  When it became independent, many people thought it would not survive on its own, but it beat the odds and prospered.  That explains the title I picked for today’s episode; an alternate title could be, “How I Did It, by Lee Kuan Yew.”  Now where else have we encountered Singapore in the podcast?

We first heard from Singapore in Episode 11; it was founded in 1299.  Under its first rulers, it didn’t amount to much; it was just a fishing village that happened to sit in a superb location, right at the end of the Malay peninsula.  Then in 1819, a British officer, Thomas Stamford Raffles, acquired Singapore for Britain; this was covered in Episode 23.  Under British rule, Singapore was a very successful commercial port, until the Japanese conquered it in World War II; we covered that battle in Episode 37.  The Japanese held Singapore for the rest of the war, and were forced to give it back upon the war’s end.  For the late 1940s and 1950s, the British were mainly concerned with repairing the damage inflicted on Singapore during the war.  However, a nationalist movement sprang up in Singapore at the same time, because Singaporeans realized that while the British Empire had once been great, it was now past its peak, and the war showed that they could not count on Britain to defend them from every enemy that might come along.  Therefore Singaporeans would have to defend themselves.  Britain agreed; unlike Indonesia and Vietnam, Singapore would not have to fight a war for independence.  Instead, Britain handed over Singapore, along with the colonies of Sarawak and North Borneo, to the Malay peninsula, which had been independent since 1957.  Together, these territories formed a new nation, the Federation of Malaysia.  However, putting Singapore in that union didn’t work out, and twenty-three months later, on August 9, 1965, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia.  Thus, Singapore may be the only former colony in today’s world that had independence forced on it.  It has gone its own way since the political divorce with Malaysia.

Events in the twenty-year period from World War II to independence were covered in Episode 98.  If you haven’t listened to it already, I strongly urge you to listen, because there I introduced Lee Kuan Yew, the fellow who did more than anyone else to make Singapore the rich and successful republic it is now.  In fact, I urge you to stop this recording and listen to Episode 98 now.  Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you here.

<Pause>

Are you done listening to Episode 98 now?  Good, now we can proceed with today’s narrative.

<Interlude>

The way Singapore both survived and grew under Lee Kuan Yew is one of the success stories of the modern era.  Independence came in the middle of the hostile period called the Konfrontasi, between Malaysia and Indonesia.  Go back to Episodes 97 and 98 if you want to refresh your memory on that conflict.  Singapore had been a target for Indonesian terrorist attacks, while it was part of Malaysia, and there was concern that Indonesia would attack the city-state again.  On the other side, conservatives in Malaysia’s UMNO Party did not want Singapore to go; they might force Singapore back into the union under unfavorable terms.  And that wasn’t all; Singapore also faced high unemployment, a shortage of land and housing, a lack of education, and the challenge of developing the economy and industry on an island without natural resources.

The first five years after independence, from 1965 to 1970, saw the government practice what it called the “Policy of Survival.” To meet challenges from abroad before they happened, Singapore immediately sought international recognition from the rest of the world.  Before 1965 was over, it joined the United Nations and the British Commonwealth of Nations.  Then in 1967, Singapore became a founding member of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and it joined the Non-Aligned Movement in 1970.

Although foreign policy was important, Singapore concentrated its attention on economic development.  The main industry remained commerce, because Singapore is situated on the world’s busiest shipping lane.  But the fortunes of commercial states rise and fall with those of their trading partners.  We saw in Episode 6, for example, that Srivijaya, the first major Indonesian state, made a living by trading with the Arabs and the Chinese, and it ceased to prosper when its partners fell on hard times.  Therefore Singapore diversified its economy.  The Jurong Industrial Estate, an already existing industrial park, saw huge expansion, and five new industrial parks were built.  Tax incentives were introduced to encourage foreign investment, and oil companies like Shell and Esso were invited to build oil refineries, so that in the mid-1970s, Singapore became the third-largest oil refining center in the world.  For those of you too young to remember, Esso was the old name of ExxonMobil, back in the 1960s.

And that’s not all; tourism and banking were encouraged as well.  An example of building for tourism is the Marina Bay Sands resort.  This is the world’s most expensive casino property, valued at $8 billion if you include the land under it.  Completed in 2010, the resort is the most easily recognized building in the city; it has three towers with a huge cantilevered platform, looking like a flat-bottomed boat, on top of the towers.  And an expansion project was recently completed at Changi Airport; each year it is rated the best airport in the world.  All this farsightedness in economic planning paid off when the Asian currency crisis struck in 1997; Singapore suffered far less than its neighbors did.

Most important of all was the public housing program, which helped with related problems like crime and health issues, when enough people got homes of their own.  Before independence, in 1960, the Housing Development Board was set up to manage the huge building projects that were initiated to resettle the city’s squatters.  In 1968 the Central Provident Fund Housing Scheme was introduced, allowing residents to use their compulsory savings accounts to purchase apartments from the Housing Development Board, thereby increasing home-ownership.  By the mid-1990s, the city-state had the world’s highest rate of home ownership.  When it came to education, the government made English the language of instruction, and emphasized practical training to develop a competent workforce that was well suited for industry.

*****

To deal with the challenges his city-state faced, Lee Kuan Yew increased his own power and that of the PAP, the People’s Action Party.  A master politician, Lee smashed the opposition every time elections were held, effectively making Singapore a one-party state.  From 1965 to 1981, the PAP held all the seats in Parliament.  As time went on, he took an increasing interest in managing even the smallest details of daily life, especially social behavior.

I have been in some offices where they have a sign, usually in the break room, that says, “Your mother does not work here.  Please clean up after yourself.”  Well, the Singapore government rules over its people the way your mother and father ruled over you.

In 1971, Lee Kuan Yew closed two newspapers, charging that communist Chinese agents bribed the editors.  To limit congestion he taxed everyone who owned cars, as well as parents who had more than two children.  In 1979 he launched a campaign to get Singapore’s Chinese population to speak Mandarin, though most of them belong to families that came from the southern half of China, where other dialects besides Mandarin are spoken.  In 1992 Lee Kuan Yew’s successors outlawed gum, declaring it a public nuisance to clean up, especially in the train stations.  Most recently, in 2019 the government announced it was banning ads for packaged drinks with a high sugar content, in an attempt to reduce cases of diabetes and obesity in its aging population.

Podcast Footnote:  A popular T-shirt in Singapore says "Singapore is a FINE city," with emphasis on the word “FINE.”  This refers to the laws that can fine you up to $500 for littering, spitting, picking flowers, feeding the neighborhood monkeys, wasting water, and not flushing the toilet.  By the way, those last two laws, about wasting water and flushing the toilet, may contradict each other.  End footnote.

Of course there have been abuses when so much power is concentrated in the hands of one political party.  Foreign organizations like Amnesty International occasionally accused the PAP of imprisoning or torturing dissidents.  Drug pushers are punished by hanging.  In 1994 an American teenager, Michael Fay, was beaten with four strokes from a rattan cane for spray-painting cars and stealing signs, and it got worldwide attention.  The local media is subject to strict government censorship – freedom of the press and freedom of speech aren’t things Singaporeans are very familiar with.  But most Singaporeans do not object, because in return they have been given unprecedented prosperity.  When Singapore became independent in 1965, the per capita income was less than $320, making it a typical Third World country with an uncertain future; according to the International Monetary Fund, the per capita income is now $58,484, the sixth highest per capita income in the world.  Therefore we call Singapore one of the "Four Asian Dragons"; like South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, it has done very well by imitating Japan’s modern, free-market economy.  The 2011 Index of Economic Freedom ranked Singapore as the second freest economy in the world, right after Hong Kong, and the Corruption Perceptions Index routinely ranks Singapore as one of the world’s least corrupt countries.

*****

To offset all this success, the Singaporean government has one failure–it cannot manage love.  In the late 1940s and 1950s, Singapore had its own baby boom, with population growing at a rate up to 4.4% a year.  After independence came, the government responded to this with family planning programs.  The fertility rate fell immediately, and in 1975 it dropped below the replacement level, meaning there were now fewer births than deaths.  That is why I mentioned a little while back, that Singapore now has an aging population.  Although Singapore is the third most crowded place in the modern world, after Macau and Monaco, a shrinking population is cause for alarm, when the surrounding countries are bigger, not always friendly–and their populations are growing.

Every year on August 9, Singapore’s independence day, or as they call it, “National Day,” Lee Kuan Yew would make a speech announcing what he wanted to see in the upcoming year.  For the 1983 speech, he lamented that declining birth rates and the large number of graduate women remaining single or marrying uneducated men could cause Singapore’s talent pool to shrink.  Deciding that it was all right for smart, wealthy people to have as many kids as they wanted, he now launched the "Graduate Mother Scheme" to entice graduate women with incentives to get married, and grant graduate mothers priority in the best schools for their third child.  To help educated women find educated husbands, ads were placed in overseas newspapers, offering inducements to professionals who immigrate.

One year later, in 1984, Lee Kuan Yew set up a government agency, the Social Development Unit, to promote dating.  The Social Development Unit has offered tea dances, wine tasting, cooking classes, cruises, screenings of romantic movies, and advice to lonely hearts; it even published tips on where and how to have sex in cars!  On top of all that, the government tried cold cash, offering $6,000 to $18,000 for each child born.  None of it worked, thanks to Singapore’s work ethnic; students are so busy with their studies, and adults are so preoccupied with making money, that they have little time and energy left for romance and babies.  In the first thirty years after the agency’s founding, about 30,000 couples got married after meeting at state-arranged events; that’s 1,000 weddings a year in a population that is now 5.7 million, not impressive.

The Social Development Unit was renamed the Social Development Network in 2008.  If you want to amuse yourself, the Social Development Network’s website is at http://www.sdn.sg .  That’s http://www.sdn.sg .  The dot-sg means it is a Singapore-based website.  Naturally, foreigners found it silly that the Singaporean government is playing the role of matchmaker, though other developed countries will have to face the problem of dreadfully low birthrates very soon–if they aren’t in trouble already.

*****

Now I am going to digress at length, to explain the last statement.  When it comes to demographics, one trend that doesn’t get much attention is that the birthrate of the human race is falling.  In fact, most of the world’s population now lives where the birthrate is below the 2.1 kids per couple needed to keep the population growing, or at least stable.  The trend started in Japan and Europe, after both became some of the most crowded places to live in today’s world.  When communism fell in the Soviet Union and its satellite nations, the trend spread to the ex-Soviet Bloc for two reasons.  First, communist governments used to reward mothers who had many children, and when the Iron Curtain came down, those cash prizes and medals disappeared.  Second, those countries now acquired a high emigration rate, as those who could leave did so.  China pushed its birthrate down below the critical 2.1 figure with a harsh one-child policy, that led to sex-selection abortions and female infanticide.  In most of the places I just mentioned, the population has stopped growing and is now shrinking.

In doing the research for this episode, I looked at the website data.worldbank.org to get the latest figures for birthrates worldwide.  Unless I missed somebody, the only developed nations that currently have a birthrate above 2.1 are Israel and South Africa.  For all other advanced nations, including the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the birthrate is now below the critical number.  If their populations are still growing, you can thank immigration for it, not natural births.

How does this apply to our area of interest, Southeast Asia?  Well, in five of the eleven countries that I define as “Southeast Asia,”the birthrate is now below 2.1 per couple.  Those countries are Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam – and Singapore.  The other countries – Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines – have birthrates above 2.1, but how long will it last?  Slate.com wrote “About That Overpopulation Problem,” an article about declining birthrates, in January 2013, and here is what it said about Singapore’s case.  Quote:

"No one’s figured out how to boost fertility in countries where it has imploded.  Singapore has been encouraging parenthood for nearly 30 years, with cash incentives of up to $18,000 per child.  Its birthrate?  A gasping-for-air 1.2."

End quote.

Since that article came out, Singapore’s birthrate has slipped further, to 1.1.

In 1797, Thomas Malthus wrote Essay on the Principle of Population, which warned that because population grows geometrically, while food production grows arithmetically, the world community will not be able to grow indefinitely; at some point famine and disease will strike, and then we will fight wars over dwindling resources, causing misery for everyone.  In the more than two hundred years since that essay, educated people have agreed that a growing population combined with shrinking resources is a serious problem.  In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Malthus seemed to be making a good point; population mushroomed from just over 700 million people in his day, to 7 and a half billion in our own time.

What Malthus didn’t factor in was that population growth can be controlled.  In fact, solutions to population growth became available in his time.  First, we can control population just by educating girls.  Once a woman has a diploma or college degree, she will probably want to pursue a career, rather than spend the best years of her life barefoot and pregnant.

Second, Malthus lived when the Industrial Revolution was getting started in England.  In agricultural societies, large families are good; having many children means extra hands to work on the farm, allows you to make alliances with other families by marrying your sons and daughters to theirs, and provides a guarantee that somebody will look after you when you get old.  But in cities you have psychological overcrowding, and children need to go to school for many years, in order to gain the skills needed to survive in a more complicated society, so children were no longer seen as an asset, but as a liability.  Moreover, parents had fewer kids, because they were busy with college and careers, and they often delayed marriage.  All this has caused birthrates to decline, whenever a nation’s livelihood has switched from agriculture to industry.

So why should we be concerned about population growth coming to a halt or even shrinking?  Because a nation’s economy cannot grow while its population is shrinking.  The government cannot function very well, either; all social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, run on the premise that more people will put money into the program than take money out, but in a society where the elderly are the largest demographic, this won’t happen.  In 2011, a blogger named David Goldman (known online as "Spengler"), wrote a book about demographics, entitled How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too).  Here is how he explained that depopulation can be worse for society than overpopulation.  Quote:

“The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings.  The European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world’s population to reduce carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and medical care.”

End quote.

As I record this, birthrates are still high in Africa, India and much of the Middle East, but eventually they will come down, too.  If these demographic trends continue, world population will peak at around 8 billion, sometime in the second half of the twenty-first century, and then start to decline after that.  Most alarming of all, once depopulation begins, it may be impossible to stop it.  Where depopulation has taken place, the median age of the population has risen, meaning that a lot of folks will be too old to have kids.  If this death spiral is not stopped, world population could drop to 3.5 billion in 2200, and 1 billion by 2300.  If a shrinking population isn’t a problem yet where you live, just wait!

<Interlude>

*****

Whew, demographics can be a heavy topic!  Let’s end this digression, and return to the narrative.  I mentioned earlier that for much of the time when Lee Kuan Yew was in charge, the People’s Action Party controlled all the seats in Parliament.  This wasn’t always achieved just by winning elections; opposition politicians and trade unionists were often accused by the government of being involved in subversive communist struggles, and were detained in prison without trial.  One politician, Chia Thye Poh, was detained for 23 years without a trial.

That solid lock on the government ended in 1981, because one member of Parliament stepped down, and when a special election was held to replace him, to everyone’s surprise, the PAP candidate lost.  Then when the next general parliamentary election took place, in 1984, a second seat was won by a candidate from an opposition party.  Parliament had 79 members at that time, and the PAP still held 77 seats, but Lee Kuan Yew acted like this was a major defeat.  He warned that if this trend continued, he would not run for prime minister anymore.  The scare tactic worked; with the next general election, in 1988, the PAP recovered the seat it had lost in 1981.

Lee Kuan Yew could beat the opposition, but he could not stop the march of time.  He finally stepped down in 1990, when he was 67 years old.  I mentioned in Episode 98 that Lee was the longest-serving prime minister in the history of any nation, holding that job for 31 years.  He wanted Tony Tan, the minister of education, to succeed him, but the other senior party members, including Mr. Tan, outvoted him and chose the deputy prime minister, Goh Chok Tong.  Lee went along with this; afterwards he would refer to Goh as, quote, “My Prime Minister,” unquote.

Even so, Lee was not in a hurry to ride off into the sunset.  He remained leader of the PAP until 1992, and stuck around in the Cabinet as senior minister, a job specifically created for former prime ministers.  Then when Goh Chok Tong retired as prime minister in 2004, Lee became a Minister Mentor, so that Goh could become the new senior minister.  Minister Mentor is a job without powers or responsibilities, and from here Lee gave advice on everything from good manners to diet.  His main activity was a second campaign to encourage young Chinese people to learn Mandarin, which he called Huayu Cool!, or “Mandarin is Cool!”  In 2005 he published a book called Keeping My Mandarin Alive, where he confessed that he promoted the Chinese dialect because he didn’t learn it himself until he was in his thirties, and later had to re-learn it because he didn’t use it enough.  Quote: “…because I don’t use it so much, therefore it gets disused and there’s language loss.  Then I have to revive it.  It’s a terrible problem because learning it in adult life, it hasn’t got the same roots in your memory.”  End quote.  Lee Kuan Yew retired from public life altogether in 2011, and died in 2015, at the age of 91.

*****

Now let’s move on to what Lee’s successors have been doing.  One of Goh Chok Tong’s first acts was to add an amendment to the constitution that gave some power to a Singaporean president.  According to the constitution, Singapore has two heads of state, a president and a prime minister.  Until now I haven’t mentioned the president because while Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister, the president was a nobody, serving in a strictly ceremonial position.  Now with the new amendment, the president was given two additional responsibilities, to control the treasury and choose key civil service appointments.  Officially this was a safety measure; by splitting power between two people at the top, it would be less likely for a "rogue government" to take over from the PAP and spend the country’s cash reserves.  The PAP candidate for president in 1993, Ong Teng Cheong, expected only token opposition, but won with just 60% of the vote, nearly a dead heat by Singaporean standards.  Running against him was the former head of the Post Office Savings Bank, who had to be persuaded by the PAP to stand in the election.  The votes he garnered were not only protest votes against the PAP, but also a "thank you" message from the common people, because he had protected their savings by keeping savings account interest rates up when the economy was bad.

Singapore watchers expected Ong to be a party loyalist, who would not make waves.  Instead, he chose to be an activist, taking his job seriously.  Almost immediately, Ong, Goh and Lee (who had not yet retired at this point) argued about what the president could and could not do, in a rare show of disunity.  Then personal problems doomed Ong to a one-term presidency.  His wife died of cancer in 1998, and though he recovered from lymphoma in the same year, the PAP used his health as an excuse to announce that it would support somebody else in the 1999 elections.  The presidents since Ong have given the PAP far less trouble.  As I record this, Tony Tan has served since 2011 as Singapore’s seventh president.

While Goh Chok Tong was at the helm, Singapore went through the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2003 SARS epidemic, and foiled plots by Jemaah Islamiyah, the terrorist group that bombed Bali in 2002.  As I mentioned earlier, he retired from the prime ministership in 2004.  Singapore’s third prime minister was Lee Hsien Loong, the eldest son of Lee Kuan Yew, and he still holds that job as this recording goes out.

Events so far under the younger Lee’s administration include the legalization of casino gambling, the reestablishment of the Singapore Grand Prix in 2008, and the hosting of the 2010 Summer Youth Olympics.  Three presidential elections have been held since Lee took over — in 2005, 2011, and 2017.  Parliamentary elections have taken place in 2006, 2011, 2015 and 2020.  For the 2020 election, eleven parties and one independent candidate participated, but only two parties won anything.  Of the 93 parliamentary seats, the PAP won 83, and the other 10 went to the Worker’s Party, a group with a center-left inclination.  Those who remember how the PAP performed in the past will call this election a defeat!  And you thought you had heard about all the unpleasant surprises in 2020!  Thus, the PAP is slowly loosening its paternalistic grip on the city.  The next few years will tell us if it is ready to set Singaporeans free from the cage.

<Interlude>

*****

Well, we’re not going to have to talk about Singapore any more in this podcast, because we are done with Singapore!  Yes, after 104 episodes, we have finally finished the history of a Southeast Asian country, covering it all the way to the present.  In the past, I usually discussed Malaysia and Singapore in the same episode, so I think the next episode will be about Malaysia.  Will I be able to finish that country as well?  Join me next time to find out!

If you enjoyed this episode and can afford to support the podcast, consider starting the year off right by giving a donation through Paypal.  Or if you would rather contribute a small amount every month, consider becoming a Patron, by going to my Patreon page!  The Paypal button and a link to Patreon can be found on the Blubrry.com page where you got this episode; I also posted those links on the podcast’s Facebook page, a couple months ago.  On Patreon we now have 15 excellent Patrons supporting the show!  Who will be Number 16?

If you can’t afford to donate, or if you are already a donor and would like to do more, here is what else you can do.  You can write a review.  You can“like” the History of Southeast Asia Podcast page on Facebook.  Last and best of all, you can tell others about the show; family, friends, co-workers, casual acquaintances, and so forth.  I look forward to meeting you again soon with another episode.  Thank you for listening, and come back when the monsoon winds are blowing right!

<Outro>

China Since 1949, Updated

 

One of the older sections on The Xenophile Historian, the Chinese history, has now been updated. If you count from the rough draft, this work is really twenty-seven years old. I first composed it in 1988, right after The Last Emperor was in the theaters, and uploaded it to the young website in 1998. Then I might have tweaked the last chapter a bit in 2000, but it’s hard to remember now. What I do remember is that after the new century began, all I did was make additions to the earlier chapters, leaving the last one virtually untouched. Well, in November and December I finally got around to rewriting the chapter covering Recent Chinese history, making the updates it needed.

Here are the topics now covered in Chapter 7, China Since 1949:

	The Establishment of the People’s Republic
	The Great Leap Forward
	"Women Hold Up half of the Heavens"
	The Cultural Revolution
	The Lifting of the Bamboo Curtain
	After Mao
	Tragedy at Tiananmen
	The Rise of the Mainland Technocracy – New!
	China in the Twenty-First Century (so far) – New!
	Today’s China Syndrome – Updated!
	Taiwan: The Little Dragon – Updated!

To check it out, go to http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/china/ch07.html

Also, it occurred to me last week that The Xenophile Historian has just come of age. A visitor told me he enjoyed the site’s 1990s Geocities-type look, and I said that gives away the website’s age, because it spent its first two years hosted on Geocities, and in the name of keeping the HTML code and everything else simple (and accessible to all browsers), I haven’t radically changed the style since then. You can read the whole story here.

Since I started working on the site as soon as I had Internet access and had taught myself HTML, in December 1997, that means the site is now 18 years old. Congratulations, we now have a new adult in the family! Actually, it seems like more than that; in Internet time, 18 years is well over a century, right? And over the years, I have put enough work in the site to call it “my other child.”

Happy New Year and keep on reading!

Windows 10–Don’t Make the Switch Yet

In a follow-up to last month’s news, my brother Chris found free cemetery space for both of our parents.  It turns out there is a fairly new (opened 2009) veteran’s cemetery in Jacksonville, Florida, the Jacksonville National Cemetery.  Because Dad was in the Navy during the Korean War years, it costs nothing to put Mom and Dad’s urns there.  Therefore last Friday, Chris took the urns to the cemetery, bringing the family closure on that issue.

The other reason why we settled on Jacksonville is location – both Chris and my daughter Lindy can get there in about three hours of driving.  In Kentucky there is a military cemetery about 25 miles south of us, called Camp Nelson, but most of the other burials there go back to the Civil War era, and it won’t be a convenient visit for anyone in my family, if Leive and I move out of Kentucky.

I have been looking forward to having a computer that runs Windows 10 because the PC I have now is five years old, and after all the updates it has taken for Windows 7, it is quite slow and cumbersome.  Therefore, I accepted the offer Microsoft announced a couple months ago for a free upgrade.  Last Sunday I received a message saying it was my turn to download Windows 10.  After letting my computer download and install updates for all of Sunday, it turned out the updates I got were for Windows 7, probably irrelevant.  Then the Windows 10 material came in on Monday.  So what did my computer get?

Well, so far the upgrade experience has turned out to be a waste of time. None of the new software can access the Internet, making the Store and the Edge browser useless. In addition it is incompatible with the old browser that still works (Opera), the new music player is ugly and buggy compared with Windows Media Player, the weather app insists that I am in Washington, DC, and so far I have found out that three of my programs no longer work.  One of them is the webpage editor that I have used since 1999, so to continue writing material for my websites, I’ll have to install and learn to use a new HTML editor.

The only advantage I have seen is that aside from a few required restarts, my computer no longer locks up or crashes.  Still, it may not be worth all the other trouble.  Last night I was up past 1 AM with technical support, trying to get the Internet connection problem fixed.  If I can’t solve this soon, I’m going back to Windows 7.  And if I need to buy a new computer this year, I’ll look for one that still has Windows 7 on it.

In Memory of Charles Burton Kimball

June 3, 1933 – July 11, 2015

My father passed away around 6:20 AM Saturday.  The whole family knew it would happen soon, and we are relieved that his long time of suffering is finally ended.  Of course it still hurts, though.  May we meet again on the other side.

Mr. Kimball’s departure marks the end of an era for my family.  Except for a few uncles and aunts, the generations preceding Leive and I are now gone.  I will always be thankful for all that he did to help the rest of us (I don’t think I can list all the ways), for teaching his kids the difference between right and wrong, and directing us down the straight & narrow path.  We’ll also cherish the memories of fond times.  One comes to mind now:  when I was ten years old, he took me to Cape Canaveral so I could see the Apollo 11 rocket on the launching pad, one month before it went to the moon.

Currently we are planning to hold a memorial service here in Kentucky next Thursday, and since most of the people he knew are in central Florida, we’ll hold another service there at a later date (not yet specified).  My brother wrote the obituary that will be appearing this week in The Lexington Herald-Leader and The Orlando Sentinel.  I’ll share a draft of it here because it gives his life story in better words than I could write:

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Mr. Charles “Chuck” Kimball passed away on July 11, 2015 in Lexington, Kentucky, at the age of 82 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. He was a resident of Winter Park, Florida, for 46 years.

Mr. Kimball was born in Fair Lawn New Jersey, in 1933. Working at both a veterinarian and gas station in his youth, he developed both a love and care for animals, and a skill at auto repair; both of which he would practice his entire life. Upon graduating high school, he joined the Navy and served during the Korean War. Afterwards, he attended California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, where he met his wife Linda. He graduated with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and was also the founding President of the Central California Chapter of the American Rocket Society, and made the front page of the Los Angeles Times by launching his own rocket before Sputnik was launched. He was a pioneer in US rockets and flight simulators, and an aerospace engineer for 43 years. He worked various jobs in rocket testing and design; aircraft and helicopter maintenance and training. He worked for Igor Sikorski and was responsible for the repair and maintenance of President Johnson’s fleet of ten helicopters. He also studied law at the University of Washington in Seattle.

In 1966 he moved Winter Park, Florida, and would work the next 30 years for the Naval Training and Equipment Center, retiring in 1997. He was in charge of procurement and design for aircraft training devices and flight simulators to train Navy, Marine, Air Force, and Army pilots. He built flight training devices for the US Navy all over the world, including the “Top Gun” Naval flight school in Miramar, California. He had a number of patents including the “Air Cushion Proprioceptive Motion System” of a flight simulator on an air motion system.

Chuck earned a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Rollins College, which led him to be a founding partner in Micrad Electronics in Orlando in 1970, where he sold and repaired microwave ovens; one of the first to do so in the country at the time.

During many years, Chuck and his wife Linda volunteered at church and for numerous charitable organizations, and were loved and admired by many. Chuck was an officer for Wycliffe Associates’ Orlando Chapter, and a volunteer for Wycliffe Bible Translators. Chuck and Linda were last active at Community United Methodist Church in Casselberry through many of the community projects that the church did. Chuck’s declining health required much attention, so in 2012, he moved to Lexington, Kentucky, to be under the care of his son and daughter-in-law. He is survived by two sons, a daughter, a grand-daughter, and great-grand-daughter.

Chuck was fair and honest to all, and always kind. He would like to be remembered as a born-again spirit-filled Christian, who loved the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; a fine husband, father, & grandfather.

 

Holiday Recap

Since this is my first blog message for 2015, Happy New Year to everyone!

I’ve been off work since December 24; the office is closed from then until January 5, so I’m three-fourths of the way through an eleven-day vacation.  The office I worked at in Connecticut three years ago ran on the same schedule, but this time it’s a paid vacation, thank goodness, and I don’t have to drive more than 800 miles to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve with my family.

From 12/23 to 12/30 my sister and her husband were in town visiting.  The main event was Christmas dinner; Leive outdid herself again by cooking a bunch of dishes (Philippine as well as traditional American), and we brought it all to the retirement home where my Dad is staying so he could participate.  Besides the five of us, our in-laws Gene and Rezia also showed up, and we had enough left over for Leive to give plates to three or four nurses who otherwise wouldn’t have enjoyed Christmas, because they were working that evening.  So overall the party was a success.

After that I came down with a mild cold; probably picked up from the retirement home, inasmuch as many of the residents had colds or flu.  It stayed with me for nearly a week; today is the first day I didn’t feel congested, so I should be all right when I go back to work.

Not that we went out much anyway, because it has been so cold.  For the last week of the year, the weather has been below freezing almost every night.  Still no snow yet for this winter, aside from short-lived flurries, but the temperature has gotten as low as 16 degrees.  When the New Year began, scarcely a sound was heard outside here in Kentucky; obviously it was too cold for anyone to play with fireworks.  How different it was from the 4th of July, or from New Year’s Eve when we lived in Florida!

That’s the way it is as 2015 begins here; now let’s see what 2015 will bring.

Joy in Town

A lot has been going on here since I last wrote, a couple of weeks ago.  Since then I have been doing the HTML coding for the final chapter of my Latin American history project, and I estimate I am just past the halfway mark on that, so it should be up on The Xenophile Historian by mid-November.  Nevertheless, I figured I should take a break from that to bring readers up to date on other events.

For Halloween, there were quite a few kids trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.  However, plenty of rain and two cold fronts made it so cold and wet, that they wore raincoats or carried umbrellas over their costumes.  When our parrot Brin-Brin heard them, he started growling, so Leive turned off the lights and pretended nobody was home.

Next, the first freeze of the season came a bit early.  The temperature dropped to 32 degrees Saturday morning, and 27 this morning.  Yesterday there were a few snowflakes, too.  And the amount of leaves in the road is incredible; on our street it looks like the rainstorm knocked at least half the leaves off the surrounding trees.

The biggest news is that Leive’s half-brother, Joy Bendoy, came to visit (hence the title).  Leive hasn’t seen him in at least thirty years; he wasn’t at our wedding, for instance.  Like most of Leive’s family, he is a pastor in the Philippines, and was touring the United States on a fund-raising trip for his ministry, when Leive’s niece Rezia invited him here.  He was here from October 22 to 26, and stayed with Gene and Rezia most of the time, but we had dinner with him in Leive’s favorite Chinese place on the 23rd, spoke for an hour at our church on the 25th, and finally spent the afternoon at our house on the 26th.  Here’s a picture Rezia took of him, at the Lexington Convention Center.

And here is Joy with Leive in our basement:

Finally, last week my brother solved a mystery in the family that is almost 60 years old.  While I knew my mother’s parents well, I never met my paternal grandparents.  My father’s father died of tuberculosis back in 1940, while his mother remarried and disappeared in 1955; both events happened long before I was born.  None of us ever heard from our grandmother again; I don’t think she even attended my parents’ wedding.  Well, my brother has gotten good at finding genealogical records, and he obtained our grandmother’s (re)marriage certificate; it turns out they moved to Gulfport, Mississippi.  There’s another surprise; I didn’t know I had any relatives in that state!  Then following the assumption that they spent the rest of their lives there, he tracked down their obituaries and death certificates.  It turns out the grandmother I never knew succumbed to lung cancer in 1968, and her husband passed away shortly after that, in 1969.  Finally, to end the story, they are buried in unmarked graves, in a country cemetery just north of Biloxi.  Well, you never know what you’ll find when you uncover your roots.

Summer, Canadian Style

The last five days, Tuesday through Saturday, were unusually cool.  A cold front passed through on Monday the 14th, bringing some needed rain (there had not been any rain for the previous two weeks), and then after that came the chillier days.  Temperatures each day got up into the 70s (only 72 degrees on Thursday), and at night they went down in the 50s a couple of times.  I can’t remember another time when I experienced a July that felt like a May or September; somebody on the radio called it a Canadian-style summer.  We even slept with the windows open for at least half the time.  Today it finally reached the low 80s again, and we’re supposed to go back to the usual summertime 90s tomorrow.

The cool snap was well-timed for us, too, because we had three guests in the house last week.  My brother Chris came up from Florida last Sunday and stayed with us until Saturday morning.  Then on Wednesday Leive’s cousin Sonny and his wife Mencie stopped here, on their way to Michigan, and spent two nights here so they could see both of us (I was in bed when they arrived).  They are supposed to come by again tomorrow, on their way back to Georgia.

In other news there has been a virus infection on my computer for the past week and a half; only today can I declare the last of the viruses gone. And since I last wrote here there have been two birthdays in the family, Leive and Brin-Brin.  Or maybe in Brin-Brin’s case I should call it an anniversary.  Last Tuesday marked seven years since we got Brin-Brin from a bird show in Bardstown, KY.  It’s hard to believe it has been that many years, though parrots do have quite a long lifespan.  It also means he is eighteen years old, but he still acts more like a kid than an adult.  We were amused to find he liked Mencie while the folks were here, and let her carry him around the house.  Well, Brin-Brin always had a thing for Asian women, except for Leive’s niece Rezia, who married his worst enemy.  Maybe I will share the pictures of Brin-Brin and Mencie here, if I can get copies of them.

Tomorrow marks three months since I started the job in Richmond.  Boy, where did all the time go?

Happy Birthday Dad, Happy Shavuot to Everyone Else

I’ve Been at the New Job for Six Whole Weeks

Hello.  The first and foremost purpose of this message is to let all my readers know that Charles Kimball is alive and well.  I can’t believe that over the whole past month I only posted one message, and it wasn’t a very important one.  That is my longest absence in the seven years since this blog started.

The main reason is my work schedule.  From Monday through Thursday I am working a ten-hour day at my new job, so when I get home I am usually too busy doing other things, like eating and sleeping, to write anything here.  On the job it’s so far, so good, but I still have a lot to learn, even after six weeks; I am not considered to be completely out of training yet.  I’m off the other three days of the week (more when there is a holiday), but it turns out I’m often busy then, too, or I just can’t think of anything to blog about.  Oh well, my gain is your loss.

When I have been on my computer at home, I have also been working on the next and final chapter of my Latin American history series.  Since the end of March I have completed the sections on Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Paraguay and Venezuela, and have composed bits and pieces on the other countries.  It looks like I will be tackling Nicaragua next.  My goal is to complete the chapter by the end of this year.  For those of you looking forward to the latest chapter, I hope you will find it was worth the wait.

Here in Kentucky, the main news last week was the discovery that $20 million disappeared mysteriously from the local school budget, and for the first time, both the men’ and women’s softball teams from the University of Kentucky made it to the college world series.  College baseball is a sport that normally doesn’t get as much attention as basketball and football, maybe because the season is shorter.  We’ll see if that changes for Kentucky now.  Way to go, ‘Cats!

For most of May the weather was fairly typical for Kentucky.  Wet enough for Leive and I to watch for leaks in the house, and the outside temperature is just right most of the time.  In the middle of May we had a cold snap where it got all the way down to 38 degrees for two mornings, but that was very unusual.

On Sunday, May 19, my aunt and uncle from Chicago dropped in for a visit.  They came mainly to visit my father in the retirement home where he is now staying, two miles from our house.  They spent most of the following afternoon and evening with him, celebrating his birthday early.

Since Wednesday, my in-laws, Gene and Rezia King, have been staying in our basement.  They are remodeling their own house, and with the floor stripped up and foul-smelling chemicals in the air, the place isn’t a fit dwelling place for the time being, so we took them in.  I think Gene will be moving back into their house tonight (he isn’t here now, anyway).  Rezia is still here, happily cooking and chatting in Cebuano with Leive.

The most amazing thing is that our parrot Brin-Brin is friends with Rezia again, for the first time in nearly seven years.  He took it hard when she married his worst enemy (Gene), and after that, she could come over alone, and he would still go to the bottom of the cage and cry, as if he expected Gene to show up with her!  What a silly bird!  Well, Rezia sang to Brin-Brin the other day, and music appears to be what he wants the most from people.  Now he’s all right with Rezia hanging around, at least when Leive is in sight, too.  He still hasn’t accepted Gene yet, but we all expected that to be a bigger challenge.