What’s up?

We are now working in the U.S. Fifth Fleet area of responsibility. This area consists of most of the waters throughout the Middle East: the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, the North Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf. The rules here strictly limit the type of information I can send back home. I can write home about day-to-day shipboard life, but I can’t write about the work we’re doing. If you want to hear about what we’re up to, though, you’ve got options. Our units and the commanders we work for put some information on their official Facebook and Twitter accounts.

To get information on Facebook, you can “Like”: Fifth Fleet, Expeditionary Strike Group FIVE, 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, USS Makin Island (LHD 8), or Amphibious Squadron FIVE.

Also, Angelina says @11thmeu is a good Twitter account to follow for photos and updates.

Top-10 Reads of 2011

One of my favorite things about the New Year’s season is the banished-words list, which this year includes such overused and obnoxious words as “amazing,” “occupy,” and “ginormous.” I also like reading various favorite-book lists. And because there aren’t enough New Year’s lists on the internet, I am posting my Top-10 Reads of 2011.

At the beginning of 2011, I set a goal on Goodreads to read 100 books from cover to cover. Articles, excerpts from books, and judicial opinions would not count toward the total. I finished the year with a total of 116. From that pool, here are the 10 I most enjoyed.

1. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley. This is series of short stories about aging ex-con Socrates Fortlowe. There are so many good things to say about this book. Mosley is a master stylist who writes pitch-perfect dialogue. The characterization in this book is particularly good. For whatever reason, when I read Mosley I find myself meditating on honor — his characters never talk about it, but they always make me think about it.

2. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition by Ernest Hemingway. Another short collection of loosely connected chapters by a master stylist. This is the posthumously published memoir of an old, successful writer looking back on his early years as a young, struggling writer in Paris during the 1920s. I alternated reading chapters of this book with reading sections of In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises — the fiction that young Hemingway was writing back in Paris.

3. The Godfather by Mario Puzo. I finally read this crime classic. Better than the movie.

4. Jurismania: The Madness of American Law by Paul Campos. This is a well-written and persuasively argued tract on why the American legal system requires lawyers to be at least a little bit crazy. There is a lot of good material on the role of “reason” in the law and the role of legal thinking in our society. I will definitely read this book again.

5. Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler. A murder mystery that I’ve been meaning to read for awhile. I’m glad I did.

6. The Sherlockian by Graham Moore. It’s like The Da Vinci Code, but instead of paintings I’ve never seen, the murder mystery involves literature I adore.

7. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. This rich, complex novel plays to my bizarre love of conspiracy theories and esoterica. As the characters struggle to hold myriad contradictory conspiracy theories in their heads at once, the book plods relentlessly further until it positively sags under the weight of centuries of mystic tradition. I’m sure I missed hundreds of obscure literary, historical, and religious references in this novel, but I got enough of them to appreciate Eco’s craftsmanship. If I were to ever learn Italian, it would be for the sole purpose of reading Eco in the original language.

8. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. Wolfe’s style sometimes irks me: it’s repetitive, hyperbolic, and flashy. But in this book he has a fascinating subject and ready-made characters. The movie has been one of my favorites for years, but I’m glad I didn’t read the book until this past year. Now that I actually know some military aviators, I was able to appreciate the book so much more than I would have otherwise.

9. The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll by H.G. Wells. This is a charming, funny novel about an English shopkeeper’s vacation spent bicycling in the countryside. The hapless cyclist peddles from one misadventure to the next until his holiday comes to a bittersweet but inevitable end. This is another one that I will definitely read again.

10. A Bell for Adano by John Hersey. A comic novel about cross-cultural relations and military bureaucracy. At least, I think it was supposed to be comical. For all their absurdity, the sections about military bureaucracy actually rang very true.

Holidays on deployment

My National Geographic atlas lists just two facts about Singapore: it’s an expensive city and it is “renowned” for its internet connectivity. I can confirm that it’s an expensive city, but the internet connectivity was oversold. Over the Christmas week, we had a six-day port visit in Singapore, and I am a little poorer for it. Still, it was great to walk on land after a month at sea. It was great to eat real food after a month of Navy fare. And it was great to drink beer after a month of abstinence.

Singapore was my introduction to traveling in Southeast Asia. It was easy for me to get around because all the signs are in English and almost everyone speaks English (Singapore only gained independence from the British in the mid-twentieth century). It’s a small, urban country that thrives on shipping, finance, and tourism. It’s very clean and very safe. Almost too safe.

Imagine, if you will, a country covered by malls. I mean just covered. Everywhere you go, it’s malls – big, western-style malls with stores like Brooks Brothers and The Gap alongside Asian-style malls where you can haggle over pewter knickknacks and candy from the Philippines. On Christmas Day, the malls were open. Even late at night. There are a lot of wealthy people and tourists in Singapore who keep the culture of shopping alive. I don’t like malls enough to ever live in Singapore, but it was an amazing sight to see. Also, I was able to get a jade pendant, two scarves, and a cute journal for Angelina.

Posing in my hotel room with Duffy and a hippo from Night Safari.

The bread, buns, cakes, and pastries in Singapore were great. There was one bakery chain called “Dough Culture,” which was a good summation of my whole experience in the country. Everything I had from a bakery was great. I also tried plenty of exotic foods. But the weirdest meal I had was at a place called Toast Box. I ordered their Set #1 (it’s a set, not a combo meal), which consists of a cup of highly sweetened coffee, a piece of white toast – covered in peanut butter, cut into squares, and served with toothpicks – and two hot-boiled eggs. Yes, hot-boiled eggs, not hard-boiled – the contents of the eggs are warm and soupy. You crack the eggs into a bowl, mix with soy sauce and drink. I don’t know why that’s supposed to go with peanut-butter toast and sweet coffee, but as the saying goes, “When in Singapore, drink your eggs from a bowl.”

In addition to eating, drinking, and shopping, I also supported the local tourism industry by going to the Singapore Night Safari and Universal Studios Singapore. The Night Safari has 150 nocturnal animals in a lush rainforest setting – it was the most amazing zoo I’ve ever been to. The animals are very active and it’s amazing how close you can get. Universal Studios Singapore was also fun, and it’s currently the only place in the world where you can go on Transformers: The Ride. Transformers reminds me of the new Star Tours ride at Disneyland: it’s a fun 3D flight simulator that uses audio-animatronics to add another layer to the experience. Of everything I did in Singapore, being at a theme park was the thing that made me miss Angelina and Gabby the most. I know they both would have loved it.

It's 50% elephant, 50% Angry Bird, and 100% awesome!

Another thing about Singapore, it was fun to be in a country that is as obsessed with Angry Birds as I am. They were on T-shirts, purses, posters, cakes, dolls, stickers, and more. I remember getting into a cab and seeing Angry Birds plush toys lined up on the dash. The driver and I talked about Angry Birds for most of the ride. It made me wish I still had my iPhone. My favorite Angry Birds sighting, though, was the Angry Birds elephant. You know how a lot of cities have a single type of statue that different artists will paint different ways? In Eugene it’s a duck, in Norfolk it’s a mermaid, in Chicago it’s a cow. And in Singapore, it’s an elephant. Well one artist made his elephant into the red Angry Bird, which is my favorite! Even though it was raining, I had to leave cover and get my picture taken with it.

Final Singapore observation: on the highway, I saw a toddler sitting in the front seat of a car, strapped in with the lap and shoulder belt. Is that just something they do there? It seems weird to see that in a country that has so many strict nanny-state laws on personal conduct. It’s the only example I saw of someone doing something that wouldn’t be allowed in the States.

After Singapore, the ship’s Christmas decorations were put away and it was back to the Groundhog Day experience of being underway, every day the same as the one before. But New Year’s Eve broke up the monotony a little. Some of my shipmates whipped up a cute impromptu party, complete with funny hats, refreshments, sparkling cider, and a silver ball to drop. On New Year’s Day, we had a holiday feast, which I’m still trying to digest. It’s not quite Disneyland with Angelina’s family (which I did last New Year’s), but it’s as close as I’m going to get to fun for awhile, so I’ll take it.

Now a view of the Swissotel from Merlion Park. That tall building in the center is where we had a great lunch and took great pictures.