I've been thinking about Dorothy lately. Dorothy as in The Wizard of Oz. The girl who's transported from a stretch of Kansas so dull it's filmed in black-and-white, to a Technicolor land of wizards and talking scarecrows and tin men... and who, through her entire adventure in this magical land, never wavers, not even once, from her purpose of getting the hell out of Oz and back to Kansas.
There's something strange about this girl, methinks...
I understand she had good reasons to not linger too long in Oz--she had responsibilities to the farm and her family, particularly Auntie Em. But still, never even one second thought about her obsession with going back to the land of sepia-tone? That's just plain weird.
At the other and of the spectrum you have Futurama hero Philip Fry, who wakes up in the year 3000, looks out the window of the cryogenics lab, and realizes that everyone he's ever known is long dead. After thinking for a few seconds, he high-fives the air and yells, "Whoopee!"
Between these extremes we find a whole genre of fiction, going back at least as far as the Odyssey and most likely farther. The patterns are simple: main character is transported via a Plot Device (a cyclone, a malfunctioning space drive, a rift in the space-time continuum, whatever) to an exotic and different world. Then, he/she either (a) fights and struggles to get back home (whatever "home" may be), or (b) discovers the reason he/she was brought to the exotic world, and carries out a Quest (this often ends with the hero being returned home against his/her will... until the next adventure). Stories succeed or fail on just how believable the characters' responses to landing in Oz (or Barsoom, or the Future, or whatever) are--if the characters are fighting their way home, do they have a good reason to prefer Kansas to Oz? If they've chosen to stay, do I, the reader, agree with the decision to abandon whatever they left behind?
And if they're debating "should I stay or should I go?" do they sing as well as The Clash?
Monday, September 21, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
You Don't Hear That Anymore
(on the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, July, 1969)
I'm old enough to remember the Apollo program, and the way people used to say, "Darn it, if they can land a man on the moon, why can't they _________ (fill in the blank with whatever pressing issue you'd like to see solved) ?" It was a good question, because going to the moon is a big and difficult task, something worthy of a great nation. If we could do the one, why couldn't we do the others? And in fact, we did a lot of those things; the Sixties saw a lot of important reforms passed: Medicare, civil and voting rights legislation, the "Green Revolution" that fed a good chunk of the world's people, the beginnings of environmentalism, and more. We weren't always fully successful, but we attempted a lot of hard things and made a lot of progress during those years. Maybe it's unfair to say that the nation accomplished these other things because we were going to the moon, but the fact that we were going to the moon proved we could do Hard Things, and it left us with no excuses for not doing the other Hard Things if we thought they needed to be done. All we had to do was make the commitment. Years later, Jim Lovell emphasized this point about the Apollo program--it required only commitment, no miracles: "We just decided to go," said Lovell. And so we went.
People rarely say "if they can land a man on the moon, why can't they...?" these days. Because, of course, we can't land a man on the moon. We haven't landed a man on the moon since 1972, when Tricky Dick Nixon drove a stake through the heart of arch enemy John Kennedy's dream. NASA now says we might get back in another dozen or so years (though it only took them eight years the first time), but given the sorry record of the Space Shuttle program, it's hard to take that promise very seriously.
'Tis a pity. Right now, we also seem unable to do much about our dismal outsourced economy, rising unemployment, forty million without health care, and so forth. Maybe if we could still say, "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we create some good jobs here in the U.S.A.?" or "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we get this health-care thing fixed?" or "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put those Wall Street fraudsters who crashed the economy behind bars where they belong?" we might just find ourselves able to take some effective action.
Alas, we can't put a man on the moon anymore. And, judging by the daily news, we can't do the other things either.
I'm old enough to remember the Apollo program, and the way people used to say, "Darn it, if they can land a man on the moon, why can't they _________ (fill in the blank with whatever pressing issue you'd like to see solved) ?" It was a good question, because going to the moon is a big and difficult task, something worthy of a great nation. If we could do the one, why couldn't we do the others? And in fact, we did a lot of those things; the Sixties saw a lot of important reforms passed: Medicare, civil and voting rights legislation, the "Green Revolution" that fed a good chunk of the world's people, the beginnings of environmentalism, and more. We weren't always fully successful, but we attempted a lot of hard things and made a lot of progress during those years. Maybe it's unfair to say that the nation accomplished these other things because we were going to the moon, but the fact that we were going to the moon proved we could do Hard Things, and it left us with no excuses for not doing the other Hard Things if we thought they needed to be done. All we had to do was make the commitment. Years later, Jim Lovell emphasized this point about the Apollo program--it required only commitment, no miracles: "We just decided to go," said Lovell. And so we went.
People rarely say "if they can land a man on the moon, why can't they...?" these days. Because, of course, we can't land a man on the moon. We haven't landed a man on the moon since 1972, when Tricky Dick Nixon drove a stake through the heart of arch enemy John Kennedy's dream. NASA now says we might get back in another dozen or so years (though it only took them eight years the first time), but given the sorry record of the Space Shuttle program, it's hard to take that promise very seriously.
'Tis a pity. Right now, we also seem unable to do much about our dismal outsourced economy, rising unemployment, forty million without health care, and so forth. Maybe if we could still say, "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we create some good jobs here in the U.S.A.?" or "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we get this health-care thing fixed?" or "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put those Wall Street fraudsters who crashed the economy behind bars where they belong?" we might just find ourselves able to take some effective action.
Alas, we can't put a man on the moon anymore. And, judging by the daily news, we can't do the other things either.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Thanks Are In Order
Last Saturday the pipe band I belong to, the Tunes of Glory, took first place in the Grade 5 competition at the Milwaukee Highland Games. Whoopee! In the picture at right, I'm leading the third column as we march out. You can watch a very nice video of our performance here:YouTube: Tunes of Glory Milwaukee June 6 09
Now, before we all get too excited, let's keep in mind that Grade 5 is sort of the "plankton" level of the competition bagpiping food chain. There are four levels between us and the likes of the Scottish Lion 78 Fraser Highlanders. Nonetheless, it's a pretty exciting event, especially since it's the first time I've been part of the band when it won a competition.
And it's sorta strange to think that none of this would have happened had it not been for a couple of my former managers at Lucent: my old boss Gus, and former CEO Rich McGinn. Gus presented me with a kilt at a promotion party in the spring of '01, and after that, every time I wore it in public I'd find people asking me, "Do you play the bagpipes?" In time, I came to realize this was code for "Are you Scottish?" which was in turn code for "Why the #$%! are you wearing a kilt?" McGinn, of course, presided over the company as its stock fell from the stratospheric heights of the Tech Boom to its eventual position in the neighborhood of Deer Nuts (i.e., under a buck). This led to the "Five and Five" early-retirement buyout of July 2001, which gave me the free time I needed to go out and learn piping. So, to the two managers who led me into bagpiping, a hearty "thank you."
Aren't unintended consequences great?
Life Imitating Art, Or Something Like That
If you've read The Last Protector (and if you haven't, you may want to click the Instant Gratification link and buy a copy before reading the rest of this sentence), you know that a big part of the story revolves around old computer records that nobody can read anymore. It takes time--time the heroes don't always have--to find the storage media, build the necessary devices to actually read it, crack the encoding scheme and see if there's actually any "there" there. My inspiration for this part of the book was my own experience with computers--it seemed that I was constantly having problems with obsolete data storage. We'd migrate from eight-inch to five-inch to mini-floppy disks, each time discovering there was some piece of essential information that existed only in the obsolete format. Then there was the mad scramble to find a machine somewhere in the lab that could still read these old disks.
So I was more than a little amused when I came across this Associated Press news video:
YouTube: McMoon
NASA has re-discovered the images made by the Lunar Orbiter project back in the 1960s. Thousands of reels of magnetic tape had somehow escaped the dumpster and are now being digitally processed into absolutely stunning images... in a lab set up in an abandoned McDonalds. How's that for "Stranger than Fiction"?
I remember the Lunar Orbiter project of the 1960s. Given the technology of the day, the orbiter spacecraft were works of absolute genius--space-compatible high-resolution video cameras were years away, so cameras in space were film cameras. Spy satellites routinely sent film canisters re-entering the atmosphere over the Pacific, to be snagged by airplanes and rushed to the processing lab. Moon probes had no such luxury, so the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft shot film (through a pair of truly powerful cameras), developed it inside the spacecraft, and then transmitted the image back to earth one line at a time via an early version of fax-machine technology. The image data, in the form of an analog signal mapping the brightness of the film, was recorded on big spools of magnetic tape. Those spools of tape survived some four decades with their signals intact (people knew how to make magnetic tape in those days). Just as important, at least one tape drive capable of reading the tapes survived in working order (in TLP, Jape and the gang at Ranger Control aren't so lucky--they have to construct the necessary machines to read 200-year-old data files).
As it turns out, the data stored on the tapes contains much more detail and clarity than the printing systems of the 1960s could handle. With a little digital processing of the tape data, NASA's getting images with much higher quality than we got during the space race. In fact, the Lunar Orbiter images, properly processed to access all the information they contain, are the sharpest, clearest, most detailed images of the moon taken by any spacecraft... ever!
The picture accompanying this posting is the iconic "Earthrise" shot by Lunar Orbiter in 1966 (and re-shot, in color, by Apollo 8 two years later). You can click on it to see a somewhat bigger view--or you can click here to view the full-resolution version on NASA's web site (be warned, it's a pretty big file).
I'm waiting for NASA to release some of the low-angle photos, the ones taken by Lunar Orbiters grazing down to something like ten miles above the surface. Even in the old NASA book The Moon As Seen By Lunar Orbiter these shots are spectacular. In a new digital restoration, I bet they'll be absolutely staggering.
So I was more than a little amused when I came across this Associated Press news video:
YouTube: McMoon
NASA has re-discovered the images made by the Lunar Orbiter project back in the 1960s. Thousands of reels of magnetic tape had somehow escaped the dumpster and are now being digitally processed into absolutely stunning images... in a lab set up in an abandoned McDonalds. How's that for "Stranger than Fiction"?
I remember the Lunar Orbiter project of the 1960s. Given the technology of the day, the orbiter spacecraft were works of absolute genius--space-compatible high-resolution video cameras were years away, so cameras in space were film cameras. Spy satellites routinely sent film canisters re-entering the atmosphere over the Pacific, to be snagged by airplanes and rushed to the processing lab. Moon probes had no such luxury, so the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft shot film (through a pair of truly powerful cameras), developed it inside the spacecraft, and then transmitted the image back to earth one line at a time via an early version of fax-machine technology. The image data, in the form of an analog signal mapping the brightness of the film, was recorded on big spools of magnetic tape. Those spools of tape survived some four decades with their signals intact (people knew how to make magnetic tape in those days). Just as important, at least one tape drive capable of reading the tapes survived in working order (in TLP, Jape and the gang at Ranger Control aren't so lucky--they have to construct the necessary machines to read 200-year-old data files).As it turns out, the data stored on the tapes contains much more detail and clarity than the printing systems of the 1960s could handle. With a little digital processing of the tape data, NASA's getting images with much higher quality than we got during the space race. In fact, the Lunar Orbiter images, properly processed to access all the information they contain, are the sharpest, clearest, most detailed images of the moon taken by any spacecraft... ever!
The picture accompanying this posting is the iconic "Earthrise" shot by Lunar Orbiter in 1966 (and re-shot, in color, by Apollo 8 two years later). You can click on it to see a somewhat bigger view--or you can click here to view the full-resolution version on NASA's web site (be warned, it's a pretty big file).
I'm waiting for NASA to release some of the low-angle photos, the ones taken by Lunar Orbiters grazing down to something like ten miles above the surface. Even in the old NASA book The Moon As Seen By Lunar Orbiter these shots are spectacular. In a new digital restoration, I bet they'll be absolutely staggering.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Creating a Fictional Religion
Those who've read The Last Protector know that a major (not to say the major) plot element is the so-called "Church of Spafu the Friendly Dragon." If you've ever wondered where I got the idea of creating a religion around a cartoon character, or want to read about the joys and woes of fleshing out a corporate-inspired bogus faith, you might want to skip over to Karina Fabian's Faith-Filled Fiction website, which features a two-part essay on Spafuism. The first part describes the process of creating the bogus religion, while the second (which comes after the essay on Saralee Rosenberg's "Big Fat Jewish Blockbusters") gives an overview of Spafuist doctrine.Y'know, someday I'd like to get back to Ann Arbor and see if the "Good Shepherd and His Flock" stained-glass window featuring the burger-joint mascots looking adoringly upon the Clown is still there... Probably not. Fast-food franchise marketing stuff turns over pretty quickly.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Another Five Seconds of Fame
Yesterday (Saturday) was the St. Charles St. Patrick's Day parade, and as I have for the last several years, I marched with the Tunes of Glory Pipes & Drums. So... when I went to church this morning, people handed me copies of today's Kane County Chronicle:
Would you look at that... the piper they chose
to put in the paper is none other than li'l old me. Another five seconds of fame there... at this rate, by the time I'm eighty I'll have gotten the full fifteen minutes that Andy Warhol said we'd all get.
In the accompanying article, columnist Joe Grace talks about how he's never marched in a parade, but dreams of doing so someday. It is an interesting experience--on the one hand, it's fun to see the people on the sidewalk waving and cheering, especially when you get a glimpse of someone you know. On the other hand, there's a lot to think about--playing correctly (and playing the right tune!), staying in step, and not drifting out of position in the group. I have a tendency to take longer steps than most people, which means that if I'm not careful I'll find myself well out ahead of my line--especially if I'm in the front row. In last year's downtown Chicago parade, I got far enough out ahead that another piper grabbed my belt and yanked me back into position--right as we were passing the TV cameras, of course!
It appears we're getting ready to start another tune, which is why I have only one hand on the pipe chanter and am adjusting the bag position with the other. Getting the bag tucked properly under your arm is a bit tricky when wearing the rain cape that was, alas, necessary on this cold and drizzly day.
I don't think the photographer knew me from Adam, and I really doubt that he knew I'm one of maybe two or three people in the band who actually live in St. Charles, but it's kind of cool that of all the people he could have photographed, he chose me. I'd like to think it's because I just look like a "piper," but I suspect the reality is that I just happened to be passing by when he decided to snap the picture.
Would you look at that... the piper they chose
to put in the paper is none other than li'l old me. Another five seconds of fame there... at this rate, by the time I'm eighty I'll have gotten the full fifteen minutes that Andy Warhol said we'd all get.In the accompanying article, columnist Joe Grace talks about how he's never marched in a parade, but dreams of doing so someday. It is an interesting experience--on the one hand, it's fun to see the people on the sidewalk waving and cheering, especially when you get a glimpse of someone you know. On the other hand, there's a lot to think about--playing correctly (and playing the right tune!), staying in step, and not drifting out of position in the group. I have a tendency to take longer steps than most people, which means that if I'm not careful I'll find myself well out ahead of my line--especially if I'm in the front row. In last year's downtown Chicago parade, I got far enough out ahead that another piper grabbed my belt and yanked me back into position--right as we were passing the TV cameras, of course!
It appears we're getting ready to start another tune, which is why I have only one hand on the pipe chanter and am adjusting the bag position with the other. Getting the bag tucked properly under your arm is a bit tricky when wearing the rain cape that was, alas, necessary on this cold and drizzly day.
I don't think the photographer knew me from Adam, and I really doubt that he knew I'm one of maybe two or three people in the band who actually live in St. Charles, but it's kind of cool that of all the people he could have photographed, he chose me. I'd like to think it's because I just look like a "piper," but I suspect the reality is that I just happened to be passing by when he decided to snap the picture.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Unclear on the Concept
Today we have another classic incomprehensible road sign. I photographed this one while riding the Harley down Phantom Canyon Road, between Victor/Cripple Creek and Canon City, Colorado during the summer of 1995. The sign gives the helpful warning that there may be loose gravel on the road.Uh-huh... the whole road's gravel, of course. Is there any particular patch of it that the highway department wanted to warn me about?
It's kind of like encountering a "BUMP AHEAD" sign in Illinois, where the roads are nothing but bumps, mile after mile of them. I want to ask, which bump does the sign refer to?
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