The central California coast has been shrouded in heavy gray mist for a couple of days. The weather people call it a pineapple express, which is a flow of warm air that spreads from the direction of the Hawaiian islands. I think they need a new name, as most of the pineapple farming in Hawaii is long gone. Maybe the suntan-oil express or the beach-resort vortex would be more meaningful and descriptive names. The weather people say this tropical gray will not go away this week. I'll have to carry an umbrella if I want to go see the subdued light on the ocean.

I can remember 40 years back when Hawaii was pineapples and sugar cane. I thought it would always be the same. I first went there in 1973, bought an old car for $200, and lived in it around the periphery of the pineapple fields, so that I could ride the waves each day. Like California, like many other wonderful places on the planet, progress and civilization has taken over and pushed aside the native agriculture and eliminated nature.

A fellow blogger wrote an interesting piece a while back about the 100th anniversary of World War I coming up in August of this year: 1914-2014. The recent protests, rioting, and government overthrow in the Ukraine causes me to doubt whether the lessons of war were well learned. We still have weapons, hatred, resource depletion, and economic imbalance--most of the ingredients for another round of major aggression. Who would want to bring back that difficult age? A million soldiers died and warped the future of the world.

It's been a while since I studied the history of World War I, but am thinking to myself now that maybe I should refresh my memory. I read Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 before the collapse of the Soviet empire, when it was fashionable to be a "Russian watcher", when the free world felt intimidated by the threat of nuclear war. I haven't felt that threat for years. Many millions of people have sprung forth on the earth without that fear, but for those of us who can remember, any new activity along the border of the old empire seems worthy of our consideration. Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August may be an easier and more rounded read than that of Solzhenitsyn.