My grandfather and uncle, career commercial fishermen, were lost at sea 20 miles off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey on November 11, 2009. This is the eulogy I gave at their memorial service at the Broad Creek Church of God in Broad Creek, North Carolina on November 18, 2009.

Hello, I’m Joseph. Kenneth Sr. was my grandfather, Kenneth Jr. my Uncle.

When my wife Amanda and I heard the sad news last week we came down from Greensboro. We wanted to be here with our family, to experience the loss together. And when we arrived we felt what I know everyone here tonight has felt in the last few days: utter powerlessness. There was nothing we could do to bring these men back.

So we did those small things we could – cooking, making phone calls, comforting loved ones.

I volunteered to go to the house my grandfather and uncle shared, to put things in order. All the women here tonight can imagine what sort of task this was simply by picturing, just for a moment, how their men might live without women.

But don’t pity me too much. It was really selfish of me. I did it because it needed to be done – but also because I needed to do it. I needed to sort through the lives of these men I loved, to follow the trails of their daily lives – mostly crumbs and crumpled magazines. I wanted to remember, maybe even to discover things I’d never known about them.

The first revelation was that there is apparently some kind of family gene for never, ever throwing anything away. Daily newspaper from three years ago? We might need that. Grocery receipt from 1989? We’ll put that right here.

My uncle, a voracious reader, kept literally hundreds of old magazines. Sorting through them I found a lot of what I expected – Guns & Ammo, Deer & Deer Hunting, Guns of the Old West, American Handgunner. You sense a theme. They were manly magazines with fish-eye lens pictures of trigger men scowling from the end of steel barrels that looked as long as battle ships.

And then, in among all this, I found dozens of issues of something called Mother Earth News. This appeared to be a magazine all about organic gardening, cruelty free pest control and how solar power can save the Earth from Global Warming.

I put two magazine covers side by side – one featured a story about killing carjackers before they get to your car, the other a pony-tailed hippie showing off his organic kumquats.

My uncle was a complicated man.

But Mother Earth News shouldn’t have surprised me.

If you knew my uncle, you know that he did not just love nature. It was his natural element.

On the ocean, in the trees, in the mountains – that’s where he found himself, where he felt at peace. He made his living far from land, in the wide arms of the ocean. When he was home, he would disappear into the trees – a hunter who never enjoyed killing things so much as simply being out among them.

But it was always my impression that off the ocean, out of the trees, down from the mountains – he was not so at ease. He seemed to yearn to get away, feeling that civilization was closing in on him, anxious to be far from the things of man. In his restlessness he grew angry. In his anger, he frustrated and hurt a lot of us – and himself.

And then his life changed.

And this church, the people of this church, made that happen.

When my uncle gave himself to Christ, it brought him closer to his family. It made him ache to repair everything he’d broken, to reach out again to those he kept at such a distance. You, his church family, helped him to find the peace among men he knew in the solitude of nature. Anyone who doubts the transformative power of faith never met my uncle. I – and my family – have that faith, and all of you, to thank for bringing him back to us before it was his time to go.

On my uncle’s bedside table I found a Bible. The kind of Bible you don’t just keep for show. It was dog-eared, with bookmarks and colored tabs and wedged between two pages, a laminated sheet entitled “My Never Again List.”

Among the things my uncle felt his Bible had taught him:

Never again will I confess Fear, for “God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”

Never again will I confess Troubles because Jesus said “…In the world shall ye have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

My mother said something last week that I think everyone here knows is true. We have to be thankful these two men went together. Because if it had been just one of them, the other would never have been able to go on.

They loved each other as only a father and son can. No one who ever watched them fight with one another could deny that.

But it was not just that love that made my grandfather go with my uncle on this trip when he needed him.

Why did my grandfather, at 73, with one kidney and one-and-a-half lungs, continue to go out on the sea to do a job that can break men my age? Because that’s the sort of man he was. He would not be conquered by age, by illness, by circumstance. There was simply nothing that he couldn’t do.

As Kenneth Sr. grew older, his body was far weaker than his spirit. He battled cancer, he had extended hospital stays. But after a recent surgery he was released from the hospital and my mother begged him to come to her home, to let her care for him. Instead, with fresh stitches and still wearing a catheter, my grandfather went to shoot a pool tournament – and won.

My grandfather’s home was littered with awards and trophies – truck racing, billiards, honors from fraternal orders. He was so fierce a competitor that around the kitchen table, teaching his daughters and his granddaughter to play cards, he would never let them win. Consequently – and I warn you all in advance – you never want to play these women for money.

My grandfather, a Navy man and fisherman, had a warrior spirit – a work ethic that he passed on to us all. But he also had a softer side – a gentleness with his wife and daughters, an almost childlike mischievousness and, like his son, a love of nature.

I heard the following story a few times this week, from a few different people:

My grandfather was captaining a fishing boat. A mangy, smelly stray cat came aboard while they were docked. One of the men on the boat got tired of the cat skulking around and grabbed him up and tossed him in the water. My grandfather watched this poor animal swim to the dock, turned to the man and faced him down.

“You’re going to go and fetch me that cat,” he said. “or you’re fired.”

The man spent all of that night searching for the cat. In the morning he brought back a cat – whether it was the same one is anybody’s guess. My grandfather fired him anyway.

I will miss my grandfather for the rest of my life. I am so sad that he will never get to hold my children, that they will never lose to him at cards or pool again and again, until he turns them into hustlers.

But I am comforted, we should all be comforted, that when it was his time, my grandfather was still strong, still determined, still doing all the things he loved. He was still unconquered.

Both of these strong, loving, complicated men left this world unconquered. The storm, the ocean – it did not take them from us. It just called them home.

Some days this is a very strange job.

I began my Sunday shift at the News & Record by going to a memorial for two Army reservists from a Civil Affairs Battalion killed in an Afghan suicide bombing.

These things are never easy to cover — and in a way I think it used to be worse when my father was an active duty Marine stationed in Iraq. But next month he’s headed back there in his civilian job with the Marine Corps and my family has been slowly putting itself back into a the sort of headspace you need to find when your loved one is doing something so incredibly noble but so incredibly dangerous.

We are, of course, proud of him. After spending a career in the Marine Corps during which he fought two wars in Iraq he really doesn’t need to do this again. No one could blame him if he wanted to kick back, settle into civilian life, tend his lawn and work on his house. But he’s going back. And he’s doing it because he wants to. As a Marine he’s never really felt right about trying to carve out a civilian niche for himself while the country is still fighting two wars.

We are also, quite naturally, quietly terrified that this may be the time he doesn’t come back.

And the memorial Sunday sort of threw light on the dark place inside me that fear calls home. The stories of these determined men — one younger than me — and their senseless deaths, they really did a number on me.

Captain Benjamin Sklaver was 32. He had been on a yearlong deployment with Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa from 2006-2007. He was a civil affairs officer, so he wasn’t killing people – he was working to make the lives of the people there better. Noticing the high rates of child mortality directly attributable to dirty drinking water, he set up a non-profit charity to do something about it.

When he came back home his unit was scheduled for another long deployment – this time to Afghanistan. He could have gotten a transfer to avoid the deployment, but he chose not to. His commanding officer said he was the best team leader, and best friend, that he had – and so he chose to stick it out. He went where he believed his men — and the people — needed him.

This is the guy who is killed by a suicide bomber — a civil affairs officer with a fiance back home whose passion in life became getting dying children clean drinking water.

Private First Class Alan Newton Jr. of Asheboro was just 26 years old. He loved playing video games, riding motorcycles and four wheelers. His buddies called him “Hubble” because of his thick eyeglasses. His commanding officer said he fought to get on the battle roster for Afghanistan although he’d had a serious knee injury that would have left him at home. In the field he had to take cortisone shots and have fluid painfully drained from his knee. He never complained.

He leaves behind a wife and a two-year-old daughter.

Watching the memorial – looking up at those empty boots, those upturned rifles holding up helmets and dog tags, hearing the silence after these soldiers’ names were called in the roll…it was one of a handful of times I’ve actually cried on the job.

Your skin thickens a bit after you’ve done this for a while. I don’t say that to sound like a tough guy – it’s just an unavoidable consequence of the job. Report on enough murders, talk to enough grieving parents, attend enough wakes or funerals, question enough people after disasters — eventually you just end up turning off that part of you that aches in these circumstances, that makes your stomach go cold and your eyes well up with hot tears.

And then, sometimes, a story like this makes you feel that way again and, in a perverse way, you’re glad you still can.

When I left the memorial I felt like someone had gut-punched me. I was so stricken by the whole thing I couldn’t work up the energy to get into a fight about it when an Army public affairs guy forbade me from speaking to any of the families for my story. And that’s the kind of fight I live for.

Instead I just sort of hobbled back to my car thinking:

“How much space, time and access would I need to actually do these men justice, to really tell this story? I’m simply not writer enough for the task.”

When I got back to the office I got to work – slowly, starting and stopping, feeling helpless.

Then the Sunday editor told me that Charles “Charlie” Hagan Jr. had died on Friday at the age of 96. We’d somehow missed putting together a news obit for the Sunday paper. Could I get on it right away?

Charlie Hagan is the patriarch of the Hagan family – which includes his daughter in law, U.S. Senator Kay Hagan. The family is one of the rocks on which modern Greensboro is built.

Charlie’s father, Charles Sr., founded the city’s Chamber of Commerce in 1888. Charlie himself served as District Attorney for Guilford and Davidson Counties before setting up a very successful private law practice, serving as President of the Chamber of Commerce and Chairman of the Greensboro Coliseum Commission for more than 20 years.

Oh, and this was all after he fought with the 4th Marine Division in WWII, seeing action at Roi Namur, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima.

He earned, among a laundry list of awards, medals, citations, ribbons and commendations: the Bronze Star with Combat V (for valor in direct combat), a presidential Unit Citation with bronze star and the Legion of Merit. After the war he stayed active with the USMC Reserves, even serving in Vietnam, and eventually retired as a Major General – the highest ranking USMC reservist in the nation when he hung it up in 1973.

All this and he also managed to raise a large and loving family full of accomplished children who now have accomplished children of their own.

It sounded like a full life — but the thought of going to another memorial was frankly crushing. I was already peeling myself off the floor to write the story I had…and now I was going to have to interview a prominent grieving family about their departed patriarch. Ouch.

Our obit said that the family would be receiving friends and family at the home of son Chip and daughter in Law Kay Hagan that evening. I decided I had to go and see them in person, even if it meant being face to face with their grief and possibly getting (perhaps justifiably) tossed out of an event for family and friends who’ve just suffered a great loss. This has actually happened to me before. It is incredibly unpleasant.

Imagine my surprise then, when I arrived at the Hagan home to find people laughing, hugging, drinking and generally celebrating the life rather than mourning the death of their loved one. I was not only not tossed out — I was welcomed with real smiles, handshakes, even hugs. No one seemed put off by my pen and notebook — in fact, everyone wanted to share their Charlie stories with me.

Senator Hagan, who I’d interviewed previously but who I was sure would not remember nor want to be bothered by me, took me into a quiet room with her son, Tilden, and suggested I have a drink with them while they shared family stories with me and encouraged me to talk with everyone there.

I got so many good things that didn’t make it into the piece for reasons of space and time, but some of my favorite unused gems:

“Charlie was the kind of guy who treated everyone the same, whether he was talking to a judge, a CEO or a janitor. And to tell you the truth, he’d probably rather be talking to the janitor.”

“Charlie always said what he meant. You knew you were going to get an honest answer out of him. That might sometimes mean you didn’t ask him — but you knew if you did, he was going to be honest.”

“As busy as he was and everything that he accomplished, it’s amazing he spent as much time with us as he did. But family was important to him, so he always did.” (from one of his sons)

I cannot explain to you what this did not only for my spirits on that particular day, but for my general outlook on life.

Here’s a guy who had it all — a remarkable military career, a successful civilian professional life, a close family and a life filled throughout with public service.

And now here, after his death, his family and friends gathered raising glasses to him and knowing he really lived his life.

How about that?

Two memorials — one for soldiers taken before their time, one for an old Marine who lived his life and then some. One crushed me and the other built me up again.

Some days this is a very strange job.

Who would have predicted the McCains would be funnier than Ben Affleck?

Makes up for Palin’s just-sort-of-showing-up appearance, I’d say.

The Canadian comedy duo known as “The Masked Avengers” somehow cracked the impenetrable security of the McCain/Palin campaign and got in a prank call to Gov. Sarah Palin.

Pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy, they get Palin to discuss hunting from a helicopter (and promise she’ll be a better shot than Dick Cheney), how hot Sarkozy’s supermodel wife is in bed and even the infamous Nailin’ Paylin porn movie produced by Hustler.

Listen below…

Feeling even better about my recent MacBook purchase now.

Over at BoingBoing Cory Doctorow is taking a look at a new book about Bat-Manga – the explosion of Batman comic books created for the Japanese market during the 1960s, when the classic Adam West TV series was being marketed there.

The best part of the story? Apparently the Japanese man tasked with selling Batman to his countrymen thought the stories weren’t strange and outlandish enough to go over there and made Batman even weirder — adding robots, dinosaurs and villains that rise from the dead.

My thing is…the American Batman was never weirder than he was in the 1960s. He was already traveling in time, going to different worlds, fighting aliens and magical villains, disguising himself as other super-heroes and…you know, regularly battling one of the weirdest rouges galleries of villains in comic book history with some of the strangest gadgetry imaginable. And the Japanese thought that wasn’t enough? You’d have to seriously look at their manga and anime to truly wrap your head around that one.

The book, Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, is available now.

Check out more photos from the book (including weird Japanese Batman toys) here.

BOSTON (AP) — The Christian Science Monitor said Tuesday it will become the first national newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online, succumbing to the financial pressure squeezing its industry harder than ever.

The Monitor’s circulation has fallen from a peak of 223,000 in 1970 to about 50,000 now, while its online traffic has soared. The newspaper gets about 5 million page-views per month, compared with about 4 million five years ago and 1 million a decade ago.

—

I frankly don’t know whether to be relieved (this is where the industry has to go if it wants to survive and one of our best papers is leading the way) or horrified (the move from print is going to cost a lot of jobs and be an incredibly painful transition for the industry).

New Scientist has an interesting piece about the resurrection of Cartesian Dualism as a weapon in the fight over creationism.

From the story:

“Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing “non-material neuroscience” movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism – the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial – in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the “Scientific dissent from Darwinism” petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider’s Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement’s war on science be the brain? “