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All posts by Elliott
A Whelk’s Chance in a Supernova…
Adelaide, Australia reached 113 degrees F. in the first week of this year, with higher temperatures expected elsewhere. The Australian interior anticipates temperatures widely topping 120 F. this summer. Forecasters and climatologists have added two new colors to the temperature mapping system in Australia.
It bears consideration that our planet is not a static system. The Sahara wasn’t always a desert. West Texas was once an inland sea. And climatic change doesn’t necessarily take thousands of years to progress.
Inconvenient truth. Al Gore couldn’t have chosen a better title, unless, perhaps, he’d borrowed a phrase from Douglas Adam’s ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything’. A snatch of dialoge :
“True? Of course it’s true.”
“… then we don’t stand a whelk’s chance in a supernova.”
“A what?” said Arthur sharply again. He had been following the conversation doggedly up to this point, and was keen not to lose the thread now.
“A whelk’s chance in a supernova,” repeated Ford without losing momentum. “The …”
“What’s a whelk got to do with a supernova?” said Arthur.
“It doesn’t,” said Ford levelly, “stand a chance in one.”
This passage and the chapter it’s from didn’t specifically refer to climate change, but rather concerned a galactic disaster born of tribal differences and impending war, but Adams, as so often in his quirky fiction, made the brilliant leap in linking the most extreme of environmental disasters, “a whelk’s chance in a supernova”, to the pernicious, wasteful distraction of tribal warfare.
My birth tribe has been American West-European Judeo-Christian Transplants with a big dose of New York regionalism.
My chosen tribe has become the tribe of listening, thinking, analytical, scientific, mystic/mythic-skeptic, who would prefer to not hurt a spider, because they are much harder to put back together than they are to take apart. This tribe transcends race and region, because listening and thinking, although not universal, is widespread. Pursued in a healthy manner, and to a logical outcome, listening and thinking will generally result in kindness, tolerance, and empathy.
If you aren’t spending all your time fretting about who’s god is the real god, and imagining that your birth-tribe is the best and only GOOD tribe, there actually IS time enough in the day to step back, and connect the dots on climate change, and maybe take a step or two back from ending up as a sizzling amuse bouche of escargot in clarified butter.
I’ll save you looking it up, as I had to do. A whelk is a snail…
The Dead-Blog Blog
So, from time to time the Postmaster at the Swiftpassage webs will get a robotic email from the WordPress system cheerfully informing me that qrrkcft@numnutz.lv, or some equally prosaic entity, has applied for citizenship as a “member” of this blog. More excitingly, they might have placed (or attempted to place) 173 or so new spamments, offering up their insights on what’s here to read, along with enticing offers for services, or goods. Most often the latter are pharmaceuticals with charmingly mispelled names, such as Ciagra or Vialis.
( Incidentally, and appropos of nothing at all, my father’s preferred hair grooming tonic, back in the “Mad Men” sixties was a fragrant liquid called “Vitalis”, which was fortified with a magic ingredient called V-7, which made his hair kind of stiff. Google tells me this hair-groom is , through the good graces of the Clairol company, still available at Wal*Mart and through Amazon. Wikipedia, however, seems not to have heard of it. Indeed, the disambiguation choices at Wikipedia for Vitalis are intent on sorting out a platoon of Middle Age monks and saints, most of whom lived in hermetic seclusion, probably because of poor hair grooming, due, perhaps, to a lack of stiffness?)
Because I cannot vouch for the safety of Ciagra should it be a pharmaceutical, although, I suppose it MIGHT be a simple transposition error for the plural of cigars in Latvian, (Well, noo, Google-translate tells me that “cigara” in Latvian means “weed”. Oh, wait, I wonder! Now, that’s a pharmaceutical I’d not have suspected…), nor can I report on the efficacy of Vialis, it seems prudent to remove these offers and links to commercial websites! However, I could imagine making an exception for “Vialis, With V-7”. Yes, I’d let that one pass.
Long story short, this is the kind of problem a web blog develops when IT SITS TOO LONG!
I have been remiss! Bless me WordPress, for I have sinned! It have been almost SIX MONTHS since my last confessions here, and we have both suffered for it. In this, the new year, the first since the expiration of the Mayan calendar, I shall make amends. I am determined to post something, A N Y T H I N G, at least monthly, to extirpate my past sins of omission, and to expiate the Mayan gods, who have so graciously allowed us this new year, at least until the next asteroid lines up on us.
I feel better already! Now, I’ve got to go run an errand; it seems I’m running low on hair gel…
‘Anything for Billy’ by Larry McMurtry, a review
Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
McMurtry’s books have never disappointed me. I picked up this and another, ‘Buffalo Girls’, at a flea market last month, without any sense of when they’d been written, and simply tucked into them one after the other. They were a well-chosen pair, in that both novels are concerned with converting the histories of rather unpalatable people into characters in a story worth reading, but with greater honesty than the dime novels of the early 20th century.
In ‘Anything for Billy’, McMurtry’s narrator, Ben Sippy, is, himself, a dime novelist, and arguably the true protagonist of the tale McMurtry has spun from the real history of William Bonney. Sippy’s voice and vision, his sense and durability, and the depth of his own experience provide the narrative grist that allows detail, clarity and perspective in the telling of events. “Billy Bone”, himself, proves too simple and erratic to make sense of his own being. Billy’s other trail companion, Joe Lovelady, alternatively, is too steady and phlegmatic to lend his voice. Sippy’s story, however, arcs out of an escape from genteel circumstances in Philadelphia, to land, finally, on the west coast of southern California, the two coasts of the American continent being the only “parentheses” broad enough to encompass McMurtry’s West.
If this book interests you, I’d strongly recommend reading this review by Jack Butler in the New York Times back in 1988.
Facebook Poke!
Holmes for the Holidays…
On Christmas Eve, I took my wife and daughters to go see the new Sherlock Holmes film, ‘A Game of Shadows’, and we all enjoyed its clever re-imagining of the detective as played by Robert Downey, Jr, a rather darkly comic version of the sleuth, with equal parts ninja and omniscient adept. While Ann has a low threshold for weapons that go bang and graphic puncture wounds, despite plenty of those even she pronounced the film a good one. Go see it, and its predecessor, if you enjoy the Holmes cannon on any level. You’ll be glad for it.
This Christmas did have a new release from Laurie R. King for her Mary Russell series with Sherlock Holmes (out last September, actually, but close enough), ‘Pirate King’. Alas, my girls and I are so addicted to those that we read it before October was done, so it had no place in our stockings last week. It’s a larky sort of Mary Russell novel, with distinctly silly bits to it, and so harder for me to warm up to, but sustaining enough, I suppose. It’s my hope that King’s next in the series has harder edges. Even so, if you enjoy Russell and Holmes, it will suffice.
And just this morning, I stumbled upon this review at Tor.com, by Niall Alexander, of a pair of Neil Gaiman stories which have expanded the Holmes canon; magnifying and extending it into unanticipated realms. It is a beautifully written and illustrated homage to Gaiman’s extraordinary skill and finess as a crafter of stories. 
I mention it here to point my daughters at the link, and at the two Holmes stories it covers: ‘A Study in Emerald’ , and ‘The Case of Death and Honey’. Alexander has piqued my curiosity, and I’m off straight-away to re-read the first, via the link above. ‘The Case of Death and Honey’ may be found in the new release on the Poisoned Pen imprint, ‘A Study in Sherlock’, which is a collection of Holmes stories by contemporary writers.
It’s my fervent hope that some deductive skills will have rubbed off on me from all this recent contact with the great detective. Then maybe I could figure out who sent us the gift of a new corkscrew this Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!
Bad Facebook! Bad, bad, bad!
Just got this notice from Facebook: “You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available…”
This bears close scrutiny, and loud protest, both because it is the craven and selfish move of a monopolist mentality, but moreover because it makes the Facebook community duller, more parochial, and more carefully controlled. This is facebook saying, you are MY EXCLUSIVE AUDIENCE. Do Not Stray! RESISTANCE IS FUTILE! Et cetera…
What facebook dreads are posts which entice you, the visitor, to click out of their wire-enclosed playground. What they prefer are “partner sites” where, as you click, you never actually leave the compound. It’s an aquarium, people.
Well, I am here to tell you that there is a whole other universe of internet sites out there to explore and join. Spending hour after hour browsing facebook is the web equivalent of always eating at MacDonald’s: it boring, and ultimately bad for you; fatal even. Today, why don’t you make a pact with yourself and go visit Google Plus, Tumblr, WordPress, Twitter, or even DiasporaAlpha? Create a new web presence for yourself, or at the very least revisit a social network that you used to enjoy, and devote extra time to it today. Craft something NEW in an unexpected place and way, AND THEN TELL ALL YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS! Encourage them to go take a look at it…
Take a stroll beyond the wire today… beyond the limits of the compound… It’s a beautiful day out there, people.
A passion for things that fly…
A few minutes ago I read a post on Google + from an acquaintance of mine. This fellow flies, as I do, but with rather more passion, I think. I mean in addition to flying, he’s been building an airplane in his garage. Yes, that speaks of passion. It’s an undertaking that takes years to accomplish. Learning to fly is something any reasonably intelligent person can accomplish in the span of a summer, but to fashion an aircraft with your own hands and tools? That is passion.
Anyway, he posted a short article about his flight yesterday, round trip from Raleigh to Asheville and back, on a day that was tailor-made for aviation; blue skies, gentle breeze, and no doubt a landscape rolling by beneath touched with brush-strokes of reds and yellows from the shift to autumn foliage. I smiled because I too spent yesterday absorbed in “flying”, and with my own kind of passion, but a bit different.
My yesterday was consumed with fixing my autopilot, which has never quite worked right in this airplane of mine; a wonderful “bird” which I’ve owned since the mid-1990’s. At times, it has demonstrated a willingness to work well, but never for two flights in a row, and for more than a few years now not even one flight in three. It came that way at point of purchase. I remember what the previous owner said about it when he was showing me my purchase. “How does this work?”, I asked, pointing to the autopilot control console. “Oh, that thing…”, said he, “ I can fly the plane better myself.” Yup, that was truth.
An autopilot is not a necessity in light aircraft; to have one in the plane is luxury, a frivolity even, if you never practice instrument flight. That’s flight where you enter and fly within clouds, of course. All an autopilot really does is permit a pilot to focus his attention elsewhere while the craft maintains a certain heading and altitude. Ok, it’s true that a modern autopilot interfaced with the right kind of navigation gear can also fly you all the way to where you’re going, without you doing much else than programming it.
Mine is very old school: it will hold a certain heading from the compass, and will also hold an altitude, sort of, within a hundred feet or so. It is rumored that it is capable of intercepting a course on a navigation radio, and then turning to and flying that course. Radical! In short, it is an archaic dinosaur. Even with these limitations, it would be a fine thing if it did those things CONSISTENTLY, and so I spent my day yesterday probing its deficiencies, in search of an answer to this question: why, dear God, please tell me WHY does it work well at times, but not at others?
I spent almost eight hours in and around my aircraft yesterday in pursuit of an answer to that question, and learned much, but not the answer. I may even be within a few more hours of having my answer, and will likely spend more time today. And yet more in the future, on this or other “old airplane” problems. Let me tell you something that surprised me as I sat with my feet up, after yesterday’s workshop time: it was fun. It was absorbing. And it put me in touch with an aspect of flying that I haven’t previously connected with.
I realized my friend’s joyous flight yesterday was only half of the equation, and that maintaining the craft, making it work, making it a bit better through effort (not just money spent), maybe even building it from the ground up, any or all of those, IS the other half.
Wind and high water: Columbus Day, 2011
We awoke to torrential rain and uncertain power this Columbus Day morning, and by the time high tide rolled in on the South Newport River, the east wind had driven the tide to the highest I’ve ever experienced here.
More images from the day:
Note the two pictures of the two docks, taken from the same vantage, from storm tide to mid-tide…
So, let me introduce you…
Today I shall blog! I’m a federal employee, I’ve cleared my desk of all the necessary work, and for the next 30 minutes I’ll be feeding the blog, which says something about the value I put on keeping in touch with… um, … with THE WORLD! Or, y’all… or …whatever.
The day before yesterday I had one of those unpleasantly instructive days where you rediscover a truth about yourself. It was this: I can be seriously thrown off balance by a tiny episode of personal embarassament. It doesn’t even need to be particularly public, like when Nixon threw up on Chairman Chou En Lai, or when Reagan joked into a live microphone about launching a nuclear assault on Soviet Russia. Or perhaps you “know someone” who farted noticeably on an elevator. That sort of thing…
The thing is, this was really nowhere near as bad as those gaffs, but still managed to leave me rattled to a point where I doubted my ability to unwrap and chew gum without injuring myself, or marring the furniture.
So what did I screw up? I was suddenly called upon to make an introduction, and then, without thinking, I extended a handshake to one of them, as if it was me who had been introduced. Yeah, I know, pretty clumsy… I don’t get a lot of practice at social graces, and this sort of thing has blindsided me before.
Lord knows, I’ve been a social twit all my days, so why do I worry about it, or keep trying? I mean, I really admire those gifted with that easy grace, so suave there’s never a sense that they so much as think of what to do in a social moment. It just comes naturally to them. I simply can’t trust myself to navigate those moments on autopilot, I dream someday I might. Big mistake.
What really alarms me is how much personal embarrassment AFFECTS me. I’m absolutely sure there are people who shrug off their clumsiness, social or otherwise, with nary a cough, shrug, nor blink, but why not me?
I even get upset at movies that depict people similarly plagued. If it ever came to torturing me to extract the location of the terrorist bomb, they need only lash me to a chair and force me to watch a Ben Stiller film. If they used ‘There’s Something About Mary’, I’d offer to ingest the plutonium to defuse the thing…
So my “misplaced” handshake left me shaken, in a cold sweat, and wanting to cower in a dark closet until my self-confidence might return, which it did the next day, albeit, with me being very careful not to undertake any introductions for a while. Y’all can just sort yourselves out without my help, thank you very much.