Beach Week Photoblogging

I have recently returned from the annual family reunion at which my dad, my siblings and everybody's kids (the 12 'cousins') get together for a week each year. "Beach week" is not necessarily held at the beach every year (next year we're thinking about a boat) but this year it was. This photoblog has a few images from our week in a condo (three units on the same floor) in Fernandina Beach, Florida (map).


The condo is rather nice, actually, right on the Atlantic.


... but was under repair so our ocean view was obstructed by scaffolding -- and the occaasional painter. Still, overall it was very pleasant. We had three of the five units on the fifth floor.

Usually we get a photo of everybody but this year it didn't happen. But the following two photos show the crew by generations.


Generation 1 and 2 on the steps of Plae Restaurant at Amelia Island Plantation. (Two spouses are missing.)


The twelve "cousins" waiting to eat at the Downunder Restaurant.

Needless to say one of the main activities for the week was the beach. A few typical, beach-related photos:















Another very traditional beach week activity is Jungle Golf -- an evening activity that is very enjoyable but challenging for the hand-held, natural light photographer. Still, these images give you some of the sense of it.


Generation 1


Generation 2


Generation 3

Fernandina Beach is a small town on the river, just north of Jacksonville. It is one of the oldest towns in the US and has always been approximately the same size (at least as far as the downtown area goes, most of the new construction is a few miles away on the ocean side of the island.) The downtown area is quiet and quaint with small shops and little restaurants.


Waiting outside while his mom shops.

But shopping and the quaint downtown are less exciting for the younger set. They spend quite a bit of time just hanging out in the condo.


Watching TV


Eating


Learning Yoga. [If I did that there would be "cousins" looking under the couches to see if they could find Uncle Lee's kneecaps.]


Being photographed by their aunt.

Another feature of Beach Week is the family meeting. One of the topics of discussion is a parcel of land we own near Tallahassee, Florida on which we grow trees. Mr. Boyd, who manages the property for us, and Mr. Boyd, our forester, were kind enough to drive down from Tallahassee to discuss our options in light of the improving real estate market in the area.


Mr Boyd (center) and Mr Boyd (with suspenders) [Oddly, they are not related.]

Each beach week we have at least one meal in a sit-down restaurant where all three generations are present. When we are in Fernandina this will usually be at the Downunder Restaurant. The restaurant is right by the busy main road onto the island and yet is oddly secluded because the road is on a concrete bridge 100 feet overhead. (See cousins photo, above.)


In front of the Downunder.

As you might imagine, the trip to the Downunder is quite a logistical problem. Reservations for twenty must be made. Everyone has to be herded up to the condo from the beach, cleaned up, dressed, transported to the restaurant in multiple cars, counted, recounted and queued up. Even with reserations there is usually a wait to seat a party of twenty.

But it's a pleasnt spot. And we can use the time...


... to spend with our kids who have left home...


... and for cousins to take pictures...


... of other cousins ...


... who they only see a few times a year.

Of course, not all meals involve a table for twenty. There is a nice little restaurant called "Sliders" on the beach were the NC contingent had lunch.


Sliders is a nice place to talk over a cool iced tea.


Or grab a family photo in the lobby. [Note on this photo: To get this exact photo of your family you need to squat down to avoid a reflection of the flash in the shiny oil painting over the bench. To get just the right expressions be sure your pants rip when you squat.]

Looking back over this posting I notice that I have included rather more photos of female "cousins" than the male ones. In the interest of fairness, and also by way of explanation, I will finish with this photo.


Goodbye!!

On the right side of this page, among the links to other blogs I suggest you read, is a link for Michael Yon's Online Magazine. Tech Central Station has a brief interview with Michael that touches briefly on his Florida childhood, his time in the Special Forces, his reasons for returning to Iraq as an "independent journalist" (aka. blogger) and his writing. If you are interested in a more personal view of what is going on in Iraq -- the story behind the statistics you hear -- his blog is must reading.

These two recent dispatches are good examples of how interesting his material can be.

Michael Yon : Online Magazine: The Devil's Foyer

Michael Yon : Online Magazine: Empty Jars

Still More Dangerous Things

In his soliloque in the film "Patton" George C. Scott's title character gives a speech about how "Americans naturally love to fight." The scene, with Scott's gravelly-voiced Patton speaking in front of a gigantic American flag, is one of the best known sequences in the history of the movies. It is endlessly quoted and, even more often, parodied. It lends itself easily to parody since it is already something of a charicature -- an exagerated portrayal of a character already bigger than life.

But it is worth remembering that things like Scott's Patton speech stick one's mind because they include a fair measure of truth. I was reminded of this by the recent news coverage of the efforts to recover a Navy Seals team that had gotten into trouble in Afghan-Pakistani border. The story broke when a helicopter went down carrying a load of special forces types who were being brought in to support the recovery effort. One member of the Seals team was reported to have been recovered alive and then two bodies were recovered. That left one member of the four-man team unaccounted for. The local Taliban leadership issued a statement that the Seal had been captured. The conventional wisdom was that the Taliban story was false but it was troubling, nonetheless. When word finally came that the body of the Seal had been recovered and that "He had died fighting" it was oddly a relief. At least he had died doing what he wanted to do.

The kinds of things that Special Forces troops do are dangerous, no doubt, but people do dangerous things all the time -- just for fun. My initial idea for this posting was to compare the risks of Special Forces ops to various "extreme" sports, but the necessary data is difficult to assemble. People who are into extreme sports are seldom interested in compiling statistics about the risks involved, and is is reassuring, actually, that a bit of casual Googleing will not come up with statistics about where our Special Forces are deployed, and what they are up to.

But, despite the fact that I can offer no mathematics to justify the assertion, I will still hazard the observation that if Special Forces Operations were considered as an "Extreme" sport, it probably wouldn't be the most dangerous one.

If you look at the progression of dangerous sporting activities over time you find that improvements in equipment, training and technique do not necessarily make the sports safer. Instead, you find more people attempting more difficult activities. As the gear gets better people add to the difficulty of the things they attempt to hold the risk approximately the same. The idea is to find the edge of what is possible -- to see what you can do.

An example of this would be the use of gas mixtures for cave divers. The new equipment allows a diver to spend more time at greater depths with more compact equipment. This makes it safer to go into the same caves they have been diving in for years -- but it also makes it possible to explore caves that could not be explored before. Cave diving remains a dangerous sport but there are more caves available in which to practice it.

There are a certain number of people who are attracted to these relatively dangerous activities, not so much because they are dangerous as out of curiousity to see what sort of things are possible. During peacetime they are the ones who climb Mt. Everest five times or get into ice climbing -- sports that are quite dangerous, even with the best gear and training available.

Military service offers gear and training of sorts not generally available to civilians, and occasionally, an opportunity to see what can be done with them. It provides an outlet for those who occasionally like to spend some time on the edge of things with the added appeal of doing something that is generally considered needful. If you die when when the weather turns bad on your fifth climbing of Mt. Everest most people will think you are an idiot -- who needs to climb Everest five times? But if the remnants of the Taliban spot your parachute on the Afghan-Pakistani border your mom may get a call from the President.

People who rather like to live on the edge can tend to be a problem during peacetime. They are the natural warriors. A nation cannot survive long without them but they will never really fit in. Civilization needs them but they, themselves, are difficult to civilize.

Americans love peace. We spend a lot of time saying so to reassure our friends and allies. But, our enemies should be aware that we are OK with warfare, too. It gives an element of our society useful things to do. Dangerous things, to be sure, but they will seek those out anyway. And if you kill yourself in an avalanche snowboarding from a helicopter people will think you are a putz. But, if you are killed watching a mountain pass looking for Al Qaeda activity they will think you are a hero -- because you are.

Update: 28 July 2005

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Paradise a recent posting on A Day In Iraq -- a military blog written by "Michael", a young infantryman in Iraq. Michael's unit has been redeployed from a relatively comfortable location in one of the more peaceful parts of Iraq to a new location where there is considerably more for them to do.

In some demented way that anxiety is also what made me want to come here and out of the comfort zone that was Baquba. That boredom and comfort was nice because it came with the security of knowing you’re in a relatively safe place, which in turn pretty much guarantees a safe return home, something that all of us want in the end. When all is said and done, all we really want to do is go home to our wives, children, family, friends, and all the good things we take for granted in the land of the USA. But I didn’t sign up for this gig and get stop-lossed for over a year past my enlistment to be bored and comfortable, rotting away for another six months trying to retain a little sanity in the mountain of bullshit that was Baquba. We have purpose now. It’s good to have a purpose, a mission. As far as I’m concerned the mission in Baquba has pretty much been accomplished, something that you’ll rarely hear about in the news. Not that there isn’t still work to be done there, but it’s just not the kind of work I signed up for.

There is plenty of work to be done here though. There are full blown cut your head off terrorists running around this place, which is why I was looking forward to coming here. I can’t explain why, it’s just the way it is. I like to think we’re kind of on the front lines again, with the enemy right around the corner. Some people like to argue that we’ve brought terrorism to this country simply by our presence here. I hope so. Where would you rather terrorists be, roaming the streets of Ramadi or roaming the streets of main street USA? The difference is that we have lots of big guns and people that enjoy using them, especially if they’re really pissed off about eating the crap they serve us here, being served portions that would leave a small bird hungry, living on top of each other, having to burn our shit, or pissing in a tube stuck in the ground that takes a certain amount of talent and precision to actually make it in the tube.

It's an interesting couple of paragraphs full of tensions between conflicting ideas. Michael has clearly found a balance that works for him. He looks forward to going home -- but in the meanwhile, there are lots of big guns at his disposal and the satisfaction of a job to do.

The Talkative Tetrad

So, why is it apparently so difficult to make a decent film about the Fantastic Four? I have seen the previous (unreleased) attempt and I can say that the new film is twice as good as that one. But saying that is to damn with very faint praise indeed.

A number of my friends have taken the tack that the trailer for the film constituted fair warning and that, armed with sufficiently low expectations, the film can be a pleasant surprise. I guess I buy that. Properly viewed, the film can be fun. If you haven't seen it yet, do so by all means. Don't let me stop you. When you go, be sure to turn off your cell phone and your cerebrum as these can interfere with your enjoyment and annoy the people around you.

Truth in blogging requires me to admit that I have never been much of a Marvel Comics fan. Even back in the "Silver Age" of comics, and my youth, I tended to like DC Comics titles and characters more than the Marvel equivalents. This tended to be a somewhat lonely experience as most of my friends were into Marvel. I couldn't really blame them -- at that time Marvel was a much more creative enterprise and DC was languishing is a prolonged dry spell -- but, nonetheless, while all my friends wanted to be Spiderman I wanted to grow up to be the Batman. That's probably the key to my problem with the Marvel universe: You don't have to grow up to be a Marvel superhero...

All you have to do is get bitten by a radioactive spider or zapped by a cosmic storm... and talk a blue streak. One of the things that puts me off about Marvel characters is their chattiness. In the DC universe more than twenty words in a word balloon is a pretty good indicator of bad-guy status, but Marvel heroes just chatter away. I often find myself rooting for the villains because, although they might be evil, if they were to rule the Marvel Universe there would be more to look at -- and less to read.

So, my biases being nicely confessed, I can get on with The Fantastic Four movie -- a film which should have been better because Marvel has demonstrated that their products can be made into far better films. This wasn't always true. Before the year 2000 Marvel Enterprises had a fairly impressive string of movies they had produced, some for television and some for theaters, and they were all crap, in various degrees. The My Little Pony movie was one of their better films, which goes to show what I am talking about here. Then they screwed up and released the first X-Men movie and the bar was permanently raised. Then came Spiderman and X2 and a couple other films -- Daredevil, Hulk, etc. -- that were not as good, but were still masterpieces by Marvel's pre-2000 standards. Fantastic Four falls in the gap between Marvel's new and old quality standards. It is not a good as, say, Daredevil but is somewhat better than The My Little Pony Movie.

The rest of this review contains spoilers, I suppose, but I wouldn't worry about it. Fantastic Four presents the origin story more-or-less exactly as it has appeared many times in the comics. The writers expected the audience to know the plot going into the film -- several bits depend on it -- so the more you know about the plot going into the film, the more your experience of it will be what the writers intended.

The production quality on FF was decent, for the most part. There are a few continuity holes that I suspect represent special-effects sequences that were omitted because they were too cheesy to use. (We briefly see VonDoom's rocket sitting on the pad but we don't see it take off -- we just cut to it docking with the space station.) But those holes are easy to overlook because the rest of the script has very little actual plot to tie the scenes together anyway.

This is a film based on a comic book so there's not much point picking nits. But, then again, why not? Here are a few that bothered me:

Setup: The film opens with Reed Richards trying to convince squidzillionaire, Victor VonDoom, to help with Richards' project to study a cosmic space storm of a sort which may have triggered the creation of life on Earth. Richards wants to use VonDoom's space station for the research since its shielding will protect the researchers from the storm. My problem: Why does VonDoom have a space station to lend out? This could have been fixed with a few words. If Richards had said "your agricultural research space station" or "your low-gravity manufacturing space station" it would have been enough. But, without any shred of back-story the space station exists only because the script calls for it.

Setup: Richards miscalculates the speed of the storm and it arrives nineteen hours and fifty-nine minutes ahead of schedule. One of the crew is outside the station in a spacesuit and there isn't enough time to get him back inside the station (and its shields) before the storm hits. Richards goes to VonDoom and demands that he abort the mission. VonDoom refuses and attempts to activate the shields while Richards runs off to try to get the team member inside before the storm hits. My Problem: Ignoring the fact that Richards is supposed to be smart and "The storm is accelerating!" doesn't seem enough reason for his time estimates to be off by a factor of 150, what, exactly was Richards expecting VonDoom to do when he demanded that he "abort the mission?" Unless VonDoom could just say "Holodeck: End program!" and make the storm disappear, its hard to think of any way that "aborting" the mission would be helpful.

Setup: The mission to study the cosmic space storm goes badly but everyone somehow gets back to Earth. (See speculation about problems with rocket effects above.) Shortly afterwards VonDoom's financial empire collapses (which makes him cross with his bankers, providing him with someone on whom to try out his new super powers as he gradually turns into Dr. Doom.) My Problem: VonDoom's financial problems should have been set up before the fact. The odd compression of the film before and after the space station scene give us no opportunity to see VonDoom spend any money on the project or make his investors any promises about it. Again, this could have easily been fixed. One scene with his banker saying "You madman! If this project fails you will be ruined!" would have been enough. But that scene isn't there and without it VonDoom's financial problems can only be seen as a mechanism for maneuvering the plot around a difficult corner.

I could go on but, as I said, there is no real point picking holes in the plot of a movie based on a comic book series -- the holes are going to be there but if you like the characters you will choose to ignore them. That is the other problem with the Fantastic Four: with the exception of Ben Grimm, aka The Thing, the characters are either unlikable or uninteresting or both. I attribute this, in large part, to the fact that the characters super powers are related to attributes of their personality: Reed Richards, Mr Fantastic, is always stretching and reaching, trying to expand his knowledge of "science"; Ben Grimm is solid and down-to-earth; Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, is reserved, quiet and self-effacing but with hidden reserves of strength; Johnny Storm, her brother the Human Torch, is hotheaded, hot-tempered and spontaneous; and the villain, Victor VonDoom aka Dr Doom, is steely and power-hungry. The cosmic storm gives them super powers that reflect these personality traits.

The film expends so much effort establishing these character traits that there is very little room left to make the characters likable. The Human Torch is particularly repugnant. At the beginning of the film he is a rich, spoiled, narcissistic, out-of-control punk with a noticeable sadistic streak. As the film progresses he matures into a rich, spoiled, narcissistic, out-of-control punk with a noticeable sadistic streak who can burst into flames, fly and shoot fireballs out his ass. He surrounds himself with sexy cars and fast women, but since he has a body temperature of 209 degrees and an unfortunate tendency to catch fire when he gets excited, he is not likely to have many second dates -- but we don't care. He's a dick. And Mr. Fantastic is a spineless bore. The invisible girl is barely there and even The Mighty Thing -- the only adequate character -- isn't powerful enough to carry the dead weight of the rest of the film.

Of course the "personality-trait determined super-power" thing can be done and still have likable characters. See "The Incredibles" for how it can be done very well, indeed.

And, of course, the characters, being Marvel characters, do jabber on endlessly. Other reviewers have described this line, or that line, that they liked and the lines are in there and they are OK, I guess. But, at least for me, they tend to get washed away in the flood of excessive dialog. Which brings me to another theory I have about the difference between DC and Marvel. When DC runs out of ideas there is nothing. The characters go through the motions but there is no life in them. They basically stand around, remembering better days and wait for things to get better. It's a wasteland -- a desert, devoid of life. When Marvel runs out of ideas their plots become gossipy soap-operas and the characters all talk incessantly to hide the fact that there is nothing going on. I prefer the DC nothingness -- it's quieter and there is less humidity.

But there is one Marvel character I do like: The Black Bolt, the king of the Inhumans.



His voice is an uncontrollable super weapon and he is voluntarily mute to avoid the possibility that he will destroy the world. All the other Marvel characters spend most of their time trying to talk one another to death. Black Bolt never does -- because he could.

Good News from Iraq (from Reuters -- Believe it Or Not!)

The thumbnail on the left is a link to a Reuters photo I found on Yahoo News. It is remarkable in that it is from Reuters and, as far as I can see, it is presents "Good News from Iraq" albeit in a rather small portion.

Even the caption is largely positive:

A U.S. soldier hands out crayons and coloring books to Iraqi children in Baghdad July 5, 2005. According to military officials, soldiers often go out on missions to talk with the people who live in the sectors they patrol. The soldiers say they are simultaneously reaching out to the local populace and scouting for anti-Iraqi forces. (Namir Noor-Eldeen/Reuters)

Since I complain often about the wire services, and especially about Reuters, it seems only fair to credit them for the occasional item of which I approve. And today, at least for a few seconds, their lead photo was an example of balance.

Nicole Kidman Weekend.

This weekend turns out to have been something of a Nicole Kidman film fest. Last night my wife suggested we see Bewitched -- a lightweight romantic-comedy with Kidman and Will Ferrell. This came only a day after I hit our local second-run multiplex to see The Interpreter (with Kidman and Sean Penn,) which I had missed on its initial release.

Seeing these two films back to back it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Ms. Kidman, as well as being unusually easy on the eyes, is a competent actress. Canny type-casting could put a weaker actor into either of these roles with some success, but not both. The roles are too different.

Bewitched is a light, fluffy comedic fantasy about a struggling, not particularly talented film star (Ferrell) who lands a role as "Darren" on a revival of the TV show "Bewitched". At the insistance of his agent, who is worried about the billing, the role of "Samantha" is slated for an unknown actress, who, as it turns out, is a real witch (Kidman) intent on experiencing normal, mortal life. Bewitched is charming, I thought, and is a very pleasant way to spend 90 minutes in a cool theater on a warm summer evening. Ferrell was well cast and funny, as usual, and Kidman did a fine job as the all-powerful and yet innocent and vulnerable young witch. Michael Caine was fine as her father. Shirley MacLaine was uneven as Endora. Steve Carell's Uncle Arthur was suitably over-the-top. I was pleasantly surprized by the film. One does grieve a bit for the eight bucks one spent for the ticket but that is not the movie's fault. It's a bit sad, I think, that today's entertainment industry makes pleasant, inconsequential little movies so hard to sell.

The other Kidman film I saw, The Interpreter, is a different film and a different role for Kidman. It is also a fantasy -- an alternate history story set in a parallel universe where the United Nations lives up to its hype. Kidman plays an interpreter at the UN who is an expert on African languages. She returns to the sound booth after hours to collect some personal items she had left at her station and happens to overhear a few words from a conversation going on in the darkened hall below in an obscure African language. What she hears suggests a plotted assasination at the UN. A secret service agent (Penn) is called in to investigate and he quickly figures out that the interpreter is not telling everything she knows. Kidman is very good in the film -- as is Penn. The film is well made and very well written. It is set in a Liberal fantasy landscape, to be sure, but, within that setting, it is tight, interesting and compelling.

Upgrade

It's time to confess: I don't keep my consumer software as up-to-date as I ought to. As a software developer I know how difficult it is to deal with a user who is still running a version of your software that he downloaded three years ago, just before you released a version that fixed a big bag o'bugs.

But as a consumer it is hard to argue with the "ain't broke - don't mess with it" doctrine, especially in light of the fact that the Software Installation Package Developers Union appears to be controlled by Satanists.

From time to time, either bothered by guilt about running out-of-date software or tempted by a new feature, I decide to upgrade something. I almost always regret it.

Today, I was going through some of my photos from my recent trip to Alaska and I wanted to correct the color-balance on one of my photos. I opened the (rather decent) editor program that comes with Kodak's Easy-Share system and I couldn't find the color balance tool. Drat! It's kind of handy -- just point at an object in your picture that you think is gray and hey-presto! it is gray and all of the other colors in the picture are adjusted, too. (Assuming you'r picture contains a gray object.) So where was that tool? I remember using it on my laptop. Oh, yes... I remember. My laptop is running the new version of Easy-Share. Time to upgrade.

I downloaded the installer for the latest version (5) of EasyShare and started it up. It clicked and whirred, downloading the rest of the software, uncompressing it, monkeying with the icons on the desktop, and when the little green bar got to the right side of the window... it died.



Ok, I'll bite: what does Kodak have to say about my problem?



Translation: Well, that didn't work. Try making some random changes and try again. (Yes, they do suggest logging in as an administrator but I alreasy am running as an administrator.) Notice that the help note is only a week old? Maybe they're working on this one and have more advice if I just ask so I click the link at the bottom of the page...



Did I mention all the Satanists working in the software installation industry?



To be fair -- this message came from my browser (FireFox) and not directly from Kodak. I also tried the page with IE, but it is hard to capture a screenshot that shows that your browser has locked up.

UpdateLater that day.

OK, I tried one more thing. Windows was able to find an uninstaller to uninstall the fragments left behind after the failed upgrade. I uninstalled and then restarted the installer. I let it run while I mowed the grass.



Finally!

Canada Day (one day late)

Yesterday was Canada Day. As it happens, I was recently in Victoria, BC and I thought I would write a bit about it in honor of Canada Day.

This was the year that my lovely wife and I did the Alaska Cruise thing (swell!, and thanks for asking) and one of our six-hour stops was Victoria. We had signed up for an excursion to Butchart Gardens and our Grayline bus driver met us at the docks. His name, as I recall, was Bruce and he was our tour guide on our way to the gardens, which were some miles out of town. He told us about the places we passed as he drove. Bruce seemed a nice fellow: he had a pleasant voice and a decent PA system and was a pleasure to listen to. He was either reciting bits from a Grayline script for the town tour or was quite the Liberal (or both).

Most of what he pointed out to us was some sort of public works project -- government housing for the elderly and the disabled, an abandoned department store building that the government was trying to buy and turn into a library, a part of town where the residents were expected to grow $2,500CN of produce each year and sell it at stands in their yards, a recycling center, a large park where you couldn't buy an ice cream bar because business was not allowed, organic farms and a dairy that produced hormone-free milk, a city-owned recreational lake somewhat out of town but reachable by free public transit, a piece of land near town where the government would rent you a plot large enough to plant a garder for $50CN a month, and large tracts of land on which, by law, nothing could be built.

Butchart Gardens is lovely. If you are ever in Victoria you should plan to see it (and plan for more than the two hours our excursion allowed us). The garden was made from a played-out limestone quarry by the wife of the last man to ever make a profit in Victoria, as far as I can tell. He was in the concrete business and he made quite a bit of money a hundred years ago. According to Bruce Mr. Butchart's son tried, at one point, to sell the gardens to the government for one dollar but was turned down and only later hit on the idea of charging money to all the people who came to see it.

Bruce had (sensibly) allowed a bit of extra time for people to return to the bus and since we were relatively prompt he was able to take the scenic route back to the boat. He showed us parts of downtown Victoria, including the narrowest street in the world (less than four feet wide) and chinatown. We also saw the area near the inner harbour that is leased from the "First Nation" (PC Canadian term for "indians") and will revert in 100 years.

With its temperate climate, Victoria is the retirement capital of Canada. It's a rather expensive place to live so it is mostly the well-off Canadians who retire there (more millionaires per-capita than anywhere else in Canada.) This stream of wealthy retirees provides most of the money that funds the city's projects and the shortfall is made up by stip-mining the fossil wealth laid down long ago by the now-extinct capitalists who once lumbered through its streets.

I used to work for a Canadian company and have spent quite a bit of time visiting Canada. Canadians are very proud of their country and will tell you all the things they think you should admire. They are earnest and sincere, but especially when talking to Americans, they always sound a little bit sad.

So, to our friends to the north, Cheer up, ay? and have a Happy Canada Day!

Bit of photoblogging

on my Live Journal

On Robert Heinlein's Lost First Book

For Us the Living was the first novel written by Robert A Heinlein -- an author who went on to have a long career as one of the most influential Science Fiction writers of the 20th century (and a particular favorite of mine). It was written in 1938 (or possibly 1939) but I have only just finished reading it because it was lost twice -- once by the world and once by me.

Heinlein was never able to sell For Us the Living in its original form and he kept its existence something of a secret. One reason is undoubtedly that he liked to claim that he had sold everything he ever wrote and, while it is arguably true that he "sold" For Us the Living -- he reused ideas and plot elements from it repeatedly for other works that he did sell -- he probably found his resume more to his liking with that element omitted. At the time of his death, and later, at the death of his wife, Virginia, they both believed that all copies had been destroyed. Later a review copy turned up. With the permission of Heinlein's estate it was published last year and a copy was given to me for Christmas. My copy was put in a drawer when the Christmas stuff was put away and the book was lost again for several months.

Having finally found my copy, and eagerly read the book, I can now highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in Heinlein's work. But it shouldn't be the first Heinlein book you read -- or the second... or even the fifth... maybe it would be OK as the seventh or eighth but Tenth or later would be best. This isn't because it is worse than his other books. (It is worse than his other books, mind you, but that's not why it shouldn't be first.) The reason is that while a "Sense of Wonder" is the main pleasure of his other books the main pleasure in For Us the Living is the "Sense of Deja Vu."

Reading his first novel one can not help but conclude that Robert Heinlein thought broadly before the thought deeply. In his first book he was already thinking about all the subjects that he would ever write about -- ideas, events and characters that would be central to his later work were all there in embryonic form. He was already thinking about all of these later topics but in no case had he gotten very far in the process. Reading For Us the Living is like eating uncooked cookie dough -- all the ingredients are there but in need a bit more time in the oven before they are ready to eat. [If you like eating cookie dough please supply your own simile for something unfinished and unsatisfactory.]

The story is a simple, utopian science-fantasy, quite similar to H. G. Wells' The Sleeper Awakes, a book that Heinlein very much admired. It starts with our hero, Perry Nelson -- a retired Naval Aviator, having an accident in which his car goes off a cliff by the seaside. He expects to die but instead he wakes up 150 years in the future in the snow. He is taken in by Diana, a beautiful girl living in seclusion who, of course, falls in love with him, as he does with her. Things go fine until the arrival of one of the young lady's business associates (possibly a former lover) of whom Perry is insanely jealous. Our hero punches the guy in the nose and, charged with antisocial behavior, is sentenced to psychological counseling. The counseling goes swimmingly and our hero, cured of his old-fashioned ideas of romantic jealousy, develops a flair for rocketry and is selected to pilot the first rocket to the Moon. Then... Um... OOPS! I seem to have told you the whole plot! Sorry.

In addition to having no plot to speak of, another thing about For Us The Living will strike Heinlein's fans as odd: its utopianism -- social and, especially, economic. To understand this aspect you must remember that in 1938 Heinlein was turning to writing fiction having recently failed at politics. According to Heinlein his final race was a close thing, other accounts suggest less so, but in any event, he had lost. Heinlein was a friend of the novelist Upton Sinclair and, in addition to his own campaign, had worked on Sinclair's unsuccessful run for Governor of California in 1934.

In the 1930s most intellectuals were socialists of some sort. Sinclair certainly was. He had a somewhat spotty relationship with the Socialist party--sometimes very influential, other times ostracized-- but the disagreements were seldom about theory. His opponents in his race for governor identified his EPIC program (End Poverty in California) as being socialistic but Sinclair denied it. Sinclair's opponents had a point. The odd monetary theory that, supposedly, differentiated EPIC from classical socialism may have offered a plausible straw to grasp at during the Great Depression but it seems merely peculiar today.

But it was during the Great Depression that Heinlein was working on that campaign. As one of the theorists who wrote the campaign material he was all about those odd theories. He threw himself into the campaigning and he believed it all. It was only later, after he followed Sinclair into retirement from politics, that he had time to step back and look at the theories anew. He seems to have changed his mind, or at least developed major doubts, in a matter of only a few years -- but not before he had written his utopian novel, For Us the Living, in which he presents concepts similar to those of EPIC as the reason that poverty has been eliminated in his ideal future.

He hints at that change of mind in an interview he gave in 1973 --

I got over looking for final solutions a good, long time ago because once you get this point shored up, something breaks out somewhere else. The human race gets along by the skin of its teeth, and its been doing so for some hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Human solutions are never final solutions, as least as far as the history of the race up to now indicates.

The fascinating thing about that quote (and this must have appealed to Heinlein) is that it is a very literal statement of the facts -- he tried looking for final answers and gave up -- but it is a statement that everyone (including the interviewer, J Neil Shulman) takes for a figure of speech.

At another point in the same interview he is asked about two of his books -- Methuselah's Children, written a few years after For Us the Living (in 1941), and its sequel, Time Enough for Love, written 32 years later. The interviewer asks how the sequel would have been different if it had been written immediately after the first novel. Again, Heinlein's answer talks about his views changing over time --

Look, I've lived more than a generation--in human terms--between those two books. It would be surprising if I hadn't changed some, grown some, changed my evaluations a bit in the course of that time, but in any case I did not write it then. And these are works of fiction.

That last sentence "And these are works of fiction" is very interesting. One of the running themes of Heinlein's work is that almost all of his novels have a calm, reasonable, philosophical character that readers assume to speak with Heinlein's voice. Always fatherly -- and often literally the father of one of the characters -- this character always seems to have things figured out. Heinlein always denied that these characters were autobiographical in the sense that they presented his point of view. This denial most likely stemmed from a reluctance to be tied down. His characters can speak persuasively, with absolute conviction on any subject--and not put Heinlein on the record.

For Us the Living has several of these persuasive, authoritative characters who are brought in to expound on different topics. One talks mostly about politics and another about economics and what we now call "lifestyle" issues. If we take these characters to reflect Heinlein's ideas at the time and view them in the context of his overall career two things stand out sharply. The first is that his economic theories changed over time -- the quasi-Socialist monetary theories disappeared after FUTL and were largely contradicted in his later work. The other thing that stands out is that, ignoring the economic component, his politics changed not at all. Robert Heinlein was a libertarian in 1939 and sections of FUTL could have come from Murray Rothbard's Libertarian Manifesto. Heinlein changed over time from a left-libertarian SF writer to a right-libertarian SF writer but libertarian SF was the fixed pivot that his ideology rotated around.

Some of Heinlein's best books are his novels for young adults and Heinlein's recurring "father" character is much of the reason that many of his fans are so loyal, especially if they started reading him at an early age. Most of my close friends count Heinlein as one of the key influences in forming their personal philosophies. I know I do. Much of the specific advice that Heinlein's fatherly figures hand out is sound, although some parts are better than others. But the message behind the message is always the same: If you educate yourself, take life seriously and think about what you are doing you can take ownership of your life.

It is this individualistic thread that underlies Heinlein's reputation as a writer of ideas as well as a teller of entertaining stories. His characters care passionately about ideas. They talk about them. They act on them. They may disagree on particular issues but his protagonists never doubt the primacy of individual reason in deciding correct behavior. For many readers of his "juvenile" novels Heinlein offers their first glimpse of the empowerment of educated reason. It's heady stuff for a teenager to realize that adulthood is not the accumulation of a sufficient number of years, but is properly understood as the end result of study and reflection.

This Heinleinian notion that the path to liberation is through careful attention to one's homework is fully developed in For Us the Living. Perry, our hero, spends most of the book studying Heinlein's "future history". From time to time other characters will come by for a discussion that amounts to a pop quiz, and then it's back to the microfilm reader for Perry. Like all Heinlein novels the book is filled with ideas -- a bit too much H G Wells, Rousseau and William Morris for my taste and not nearly enough of the Burkean sensibleness that would follow a few years later -- but it differs from Heinlein's other works in that Heinlein forgot to give the characters ways show the ideas in action. Heinlein's best books are about characters who act on their convictions. The characters in For Us the Living might have done so if the plot had called on them to act at all.

Leafing through an old book once I came across an essay on Russian history that my grandfather had written in high school. His teacher had written a note at the top suggesting that the essay was deficient in scholarship and, reading the essay I could see the teacher's point. But my grandfather went on to be the Dean of Law at Stetson University and one of the founders of the American Bar Association so, presumably, his scholarship improved. Robert A Heinlein was considerably younger than I am now when he wrote For Us the Living and neither his philosophy nor his writing skills were mature but, if you are interested in Heinlein (as I am) it is a fascinating book because it contains all of the elements of his later work in embryonic form, and also because it gives a point of reference to see how fast he improved as a writer.

The Heinlein quotes above are from The Robert Heinlein Interview and other Heinleiniana by J. Neil Shulman. (Pulpless.com, Inc.) and I will close with a snippit that my friend Brad Linaweaver wrote for the introduction:

...for those of us who burn for technological marvels and want freedom to enjoy them instead of being slaved to a technocratic Big Brother, Heinlein created the blueprint that may get us to a better world. Not Utopia, because he taught us that such a dream truly is nowhere. A better world, on the other hand, is not impossible. It is simply hard to achieve.

These two books should be read by all fans of Robert A Heinlein.
BUT...
If you are not yet a fan keep scrolling.

You might want to read these first...

Merkury Optics .45x Wide Angle Converter

I'm getting ready for my summer vacation and part of the preparations involves adding a bit of photographic gear to my bag. Since the funds available are limited I am doing a bit of shopping online. Some of what I am buying is used and some is off-brand merchandise. For the most part I am happy with my purchases but the rule that you get what you pay for still applies.

Our topic for today is the wide angle adapter I bought for my Kodak dx-6490 digital camera. I like the camera because of its long zoom range (10x optical) but the added zoom is all at the telephoto end. It goes from "normal" at one end to the longest telephoto you can use without a tripod at the other. At the shortest focal length it is no wider than most other cameras.

When faced with a scenic subject that is wider than my lens allows I will sometimes shoot overlapping shots with the idea that I will combine them into a panorama on my computer but, truth be told, I seldom do so. I wind up instead with a bunch of oddly-composed individual shots that I have forgotten can be pieced together into a stunning vista.

For those situations I bought myself a wide angle converter on eBay. The better quality lens for this is the Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar 0.7x wide-angle converter (about 130 dollars on eBay) which also requires a $20 converter ring to mount it on the camera. The lens I bought -- a Merkury Optics .45x adapter -- comes with the needed adapter ring and only costs $50 online. I've taken a couple of test shots with it and it appears to be an adequate value for the money. It takes an OK picture and I will use it for a while to see if I find such an accessory useful. If I do I will probably replace it with the more expensive lens at some point.

I thought I would share my test results so other cheapskates can have a bit more information about what they are buying.

Here are two shots I took standing in the road in front of my house. The first one uses the normal wide setting on my camera. The second was taken with the new lens.




If you look closely at the first shot above you will see the wide angle adapter sitting in my mailbox where I set it down to take that shot.

The adapter does widen things a bit but, at least on my camera, it is nowhere near what I would expect from a .45x adapter. The image below shows the normal shot inset in the adapter shot assuming the actual magnification to be .8x. The inset is just a smidge too big (look at the tree in the top right) but it is close. My calculations suggest that the actual magnification is 0.79.



The sharpness at the center of the two image is comparable and the top, bottom, left and right center sections are fine. I don't see any vignetting but the image gets a bit soft in the corners with the adapter. The images below are 2x magnifications of the upper-left corners of the two images.


Without the adapter the corners of the image are sharp and show very little chromatic distortion. (I take the blue smudges to be UV lens flare.)


With the adapter the corners are less sharp and a certain amount of chromatic distortion is visible.

The funny thing is that if I like the Merkury lens I will probably replace it and, if I don't like it I will keep it forever. If a wide angle adapter turns out to be a handy thing to have I will want to get one with a bit better optics and more realistic specifications. Otherwise, I use this one seldom but with perfect satisfaction.

Dangerous Things

One of the difficulties one has with wrapping one's head around the news from Iraq is the matter of perspective. Most people who try to stay informed have a general idea of how many US soldiers have been killed in Iraq (1653 when I pulled together my statistics, a few more now), and they may know the approximate number of troops in theater (somewhere around 140 thousand). With a bit of simple math they can work out the odds but, aside from the sense that Iraq is not altogether a safe place, they will lack the context to answer the question -- "How dangerous is that?"

To compare solidering with other professions we need to convert the statistics to the units that are usually used for such things: annual fatalities per hundred thousand full time workers. So let's do so. As I said, we will use 1653 as the total fatalities due to enemy action and accidents for the war so far. The war has been going on for 2.2 years which makes the annual fatality rate 751. Using a figure of 140 thousand for the average strength in theater we divide by 1.4 to get the fatalities per hundred thousand or 536 annual deaths per 100,000 soldiers. So, how dangerous is that, then?

Well let's see, the most dangerous job category in the US, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is "lumber cutter" with 117.8 annual deaths per hundred thousand full time workers. So, our calculation suggests that being a soldier in the Iraqi theater is 4.6 times as dangerous as being a lumberjack. Now that's pretty alarming if your kid is being sent to Iraq; cutting lumber sounds like a dangerous sort of job and soldiering is several times as bad. But then, most of us aren't in the timber cutting industry and few of our son's considered lumberjacking as an alternative before they decided to sign up. So we know that being a soldier is 4.6 times as dangerous as being a lumberjack but we still can't answer the question -- "So, how dangerous is that, then?"


Looking for an example a bit closer to home I thought about my son and the choices he and some of his friends made. He spent nine months in Iraq as a driver for a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and was part of the 3rd Infantry's assault on Baghdad. He's an outdoorsy young man and might enjoy the life of a lumberjack -- but I don't remember timber cutting as a career path he considered. He decided to join the Army and some of his friends -- with similarly lackluster academic performances in high school -- decided to stay home and enroll in the local community college. Our question then: how does going to Iraq and being shot at most every day compare to living at home with your parents and going to the local community college?

As my measure of the risks of going to the local community college I will assume the student makes the commute on a small motorcycle and further assume that the ride is the only risk involved. The reality is that many students will choose a safer form of transportation but incur other risks that I am not addressing. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration the motorcycle fatality rate in 2003 as 38.38 deaths per 100 million passenger miles. That doesn't sound too bad -- 100 million miles is to the moon and back 50 times. To equal the 751 deaths in Iraq you would need 1.96 billion motorcycle passenger miles.

... or about 14,000 miles per soldier per year. Map quest tells me that the main campus of our county's community college is 15 miles away. That's 30 miles round trip. Multiply that by five days a week and 50 weeks a year and you get 7,500 miles a year -- and twice that much if you come home for lunch every day. So now we can answer our question. How dangerous is it to be a soldier in Iraq? It is somewhat more dangerous than staying home and studying library science at the local community college -- but only if you take your lunch and eat on campus. If you go home for lunch it's safer to let the Iraqis shoot at you.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; Federal Highway Administration; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Spreading Manure on a Bush for Arbor Day

A recent news story caught my attention because it combines two interests of mine. These are the restoration of the American chestnut by developing a blight-resistant line, and the observation that the wire services will never give the president an even break. Below is a brief Associated Press story about an Arbor Day tree planting event on the White House lawn. It ran with exactly the same wording in several papers. I believe I am quoting the New York Post.

Borrowing the color scheme from the Red State/Blue State maps I have color coded the text as follows: Red text is information that is necessary to the reporting of the event. Blue text presents details that would not have been reported if President Clinton has planted the tree, and Gray text represents information that I believe to be incorrect or confusing.

The young American chestnut was already sitting in its hole in the ground and a fresh pile of dirt was waiting nearby when the president - wearing a business suit - strode out to throw on three shovelfuls and pronounce his Arbor Day commemoration complete.

"We don't want to get carried away," laughed President Bush.

Despite the brevity of what the White House called a "ceremonial planting" on Friday, the presidential event was aimed at aiding a long effort to bring back the American chestnut. Once a dominant presence in the eastern United States, the graceful trees were virtually wiped out by blight starting at the turn of the 20th century. Now, after years of breeding, cloning and crossbreeding with other species, the Agriculture Department is ready to reintroduce disease-resistant chestnuts to eastern forests next year.

So the White House picked an American chestnut for Bush to plant on the mansion's grounds to mark National Arbor Day.

"This is our little part to help it come back," Bush told reporters. "Our message is to our fellow citizens: plant trees - it's good for the economy and it's good for the environment."

The president had a fair amount of help, both before and after the brief event.

"Ready to go? Alright, let's do it," Bush said to Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, also in dark suit.

Each man pitched spadefuls of dirt into the hole holding the green-leafed sapling - Bush mock-grunting at the effort, presidential dog Miss Beazley underfoot and Johanns only nearly missing the president's pants leg at one point. Bush then quickly called it a day and headed back inside the White House.

Several National Park Services workers moved in to finish the job. And now, an American chestnut fills the corner of the White House's North Lawn occupied by a 100-year-old tulip poplar until severe storm damage required its removal four years ago.

Some may be tempted to call foul because I made the president's joke about "not getting carried away" blue. The thing is, if you read the transcript of the event, he made several jokes and the AP picked the least funny one because it fit their portrayal of the presidents participation as unenthusiastic, phony and perfunctory.

THE PRESIDENT: Glad you all are here. Ready, Mr. Secretary? SECRETARY JOHANNS: I'm ready.

THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I'm honored -- we're honored to be here with the Secretary of Agriculture, as well as Marshal Case, who is head of the American Chestnut Foundation. We are planting an American chestnut tree here at the White House. This is the 133rd year of Arbor Day. Our message is to our fellow citizens, plant trees -- it's good for the economy and it's good for the environment.

As well, Marshal informs me that the American Chestnut Foundation has worked very closely with the Agriculture Department to coming up with a disease-resistant strain of the American chestnut. And he says we're making good progress, and that one day the American chestnut, which had been wiped out by blight, will be coming back. And this is our little part to help it come back.

So, Mr. Secretary, are you prepared? SECRETARY JOHANNS: I am ready. Let's -- THE PRESIDENT: A man known for shoveling a lot of things. (Laughter.) SECRETARY JOHANNS: Exactly. THE PRESIDENT: Ready to go? SECRETARY JOHANNS: Yes, I am ready. THE PRESIDENT: All right, let's do it.

"A man known for shoveling a lot of things... Exactly." Funnier, don't you think?

Actually, I was tempted to make the president's admonition to plant trees blue because it was rearranged and taken out of context. If you read it is the transcript, while it isn't exactly brilliant oratory, it is still a servicable part of a passable presidential Arbor Day speech. It is only when you pull it out of context that it sounds like a line from the Judge Dread.

Eat recycled Food! It's good for the environment -- and OK for you!

Hat Tip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for bringing the Arbor Day event to my attention (although the crankiness about the AP slant is only mine. Reynolds posted a link to a much more evenhanded version of the story.)

Early Morning Birdsongs: Lesson One

One of the pleasures of living in central North Carolina is that, for much of the year, one can sleep quite comfortably with the window open. If you have a tree near your window the month of May provides an opportunity to brush up on recognizing early morning birdcalls. Today's lesson: The Northern Cardinal.

The male Northern Cardinal is perhaps the easiest North American songbird to recognize because of his bright color and striking markings. With a little practice you can learn to recognize his distinctive song as well. The Cardinal is a strong singer with a loud, clear, repetitious whistle. The Cardinal sings throughout the day and into the evening but is especially easy to pick out in the morning -- about half an hour before your alarm clock goes off.

The song of the Cardinal consists of a number of phrases which range across the species but are selected, combined and repeated in varying ways to form local "dialects" that vary from region to region. In central North Carolina the typical call goes -- purTEE purTEE birDEE birDEE ... cheer ... cheer ... kill! kill! kill! kill! kill!. It's a very hearty, outdoorsy sort of song that tends to make half-asleep sportsmen think about their firearms.

A number of resources are available online that will help you familiarize yourself with the song of the Cardinal. This page on eNature.com has some sound files you can play to hear a Cardinal and this page at NASA has excerpts from an audio field guide that provides even more information. Be sure to consult these resources to be sure you can identify the bird whose singing wakes you up in the morning. It would be a pity to shoot the wrong bird.

The Stifling Fog that is America

The interesting thing about European cultural anti-Americanism is how unfocused it is. The America that oppresses the European intellectual is not a specific place or a particular people or a well understood set of attitudes. It is instead a miasma, an unsettling odor in the air. It surrounds them, pervades them, worries and troubles them. And, most of all, it reminds them of America.

Consider this excerpt about Danish filmmaker, Lars von Trier, from a Reuters story about this year's film festival at Cannes:

Von Trier, whose fear of flying has prevented him from visiting the United States, won thunderous cheers at the world premiere and a news conference, where he said he enjoyed bashing America on screen because it invades his life even in Denmark.

"We are all under the influence -- and it's a very bad influence -- from America," said the 49-year-old Dane. "In my country everything has to do with America. America is kind of sitting on the world.

"America has to do with 60 percent of my brain and all things I experience in my life, and I'm not happy about that," von Trier said. I'd say 60 percent of my life is American so I am in fact an 'American' too. But I can't go there and vote or change anything there. That is why I make films about America.

Von Trier is a very capable filmmaker by all acounts. My daughter, whose taste and sensibility are impeccable*, is a huge fan, and his films, especially Dogville, are on my list to watch when time allows. She tells me that von Trier sets his films in the US and that his films explore some of the darker sides of human nature. Many people (von Trier included) think that this makes his films somehow anti-American, but there is nothing exclusively American, or even particularly American, about the vices he illuminates.

It is rather more likely that von Trier sets his films in America because he wants them to be about the the problems -- not about the setting. If a filmmaker does a film about corruption in the police force in Sophia, Bulgaria, then the film will be about Sophia, but the same film set in Chicago will be about corruption in the police. The international ubiquity of American films makes a midwestern American setting the least intrusive neutral background against which international filmmakers can tell their stories. At some level the filmmakers realize this and they resent it. Add to that the sense that all the annoyances of modern life somehow arise in America and you have the roots of an unthought anti-Americanism.

Of course the "America" that oppresses the average European does not really exist. If you take the typical citizen of France or Denmark and sit him down at a New York City lunch counter he will be genuinely surprised when he finishes his meal without alarms and gunfire at the bank across the street. The world watches our television shows and movies and, to a large extent (God help us) they believe them.

As the new millennium starts, America is the best-known country in the history of the planet, and a total mystery. Everybody knows all about it but most of what they "know" is wrong. What the world sees is the big-pile-o-crap stacked up by Hollywood and New York. Hidden behind it, and sometimes buried under it, is the other, the real America. Von Trier would be horrified to hear it but Denmark is, in a sense, a red state -- and that bad "American" odor in the air is good old, all-American blue state bullshit.

Of course, vaguely understood anti-Americanism is not limited to the intellegencia, nor to Europe. Consider this from another Reuters story about a lake in rural Russia swallowed by a sinkhole.

Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system, but some villagers had more sinister explanations.

"I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us," said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house.

* Yes, doubter, she is really my daughter: she has my grandmother's eyes. The genes for good taste and sensibility merely skipped my generation. I'm, not sure where the genes for good spelling came from though, come to think of it.. I don't seem to remember a good speller in the family before...

Helpful Spoilers

At one minute after midnight tonight I will be sitting in a theater waiting for the new Star Wars film to start. I expect to enjoy it hugely and I would like to thank a number of conservative commentators who have posted reviews critical of the film that will help me enjoy it even more. In particular, Jason Apuzzo at Libertas and Joun Podhoretz at the Weekly Standard have both found things to be annoyed about in the film (to varying degrees – Podhoretz didn’t like it but Apuzzo did) . To them, especially, I offer thanks for almost certainly increasing my enjoyment. Confused? Perhaps I should explain.

Have you ever seen a film that annoys the crap out of you the first time you see it but improves markedly when you see it again? I’m not talking about surprise-ending films -- Usual Suspects, Sixth Sense or Momento – that are good the first time but better the second time since you can see how they misled you; I’m talking films that are real stinkeroos on the first viewing because they have huge flaws -- annoyances that take you longer to get over than the running time of the film. Sometimes, if you give those films a second chance – if you go back to the buffet knowing what the cat did in the potato salad – you can ignore the flaw and find that, on balance, the film is much better than you thought.

I will offer two examples: The first is the Coen brother’s Big Lebowski – one of the funniest films of all time – which has huge pacing problems in its beginning, and a framing device (the old cowboy bit) that makes the problem even worse. The first time you see it you spend the whole movie being cranky about how boring the first fifteen minutes is. If you watch it again the protective eye-glazing that protects you from commercials on TV will kick in during the tedious bits and you can enjoy the rest of the film.

The second example is closer to home for my topic; imagine how much more you might have enjoyed The Phantom Menace if someone had told you exactly how annoying JarJar Binks was going to be, before you went to the movie. You could have considered all of his scenes as some sort of advertisement for an ill-conceived action figure that was somehow edited into the film by mistake.

This is the great service offered by some film reviewers: they subject themselves to the tiresome bits in films so you begin the getting-over-it process well in advance. That way you don't need to see things twice. Given the price of a movie ticket these days, the see it again and then decide what you think process can be pretty expensive.

Several reviewers, including the ones I mentioned, have warned that the latest Star Wars film contains a number of digs at the President and the War in Iraq, both of which I support. These are minor items in the film –- a line or two here and there -- that Lucas put in for his liberal Hollywood pals. There is no reason that he shouldn’t put a few lefty Easter eggs in his film if he wants to – he’s too good a filmmaker to let them really interfere with the story –- but I am grateful to know that they are there so I don’t bite down on them, confused by their color and assuming they are chocolate.

Update

As predicted, I loved the movie. It's good that I knew about the Bush-bashing Easter eggs ahead of time. I probably would have caught a few of them -- not because I am politically thin-skinned, but because of some statements that Lucas made at Cannes. I understand why he felt the need, of course. It's the compulsion of the language. When one is in Italy, if one knows a bit of Italian one must say something in Italian. When in France, if one knows French, one must speak some French so they know you are trying. And when one is interviewed by Reuter's at Cannes, one must say something idiotic, just to be polite.

I have made a few more comments on ROTS (sorry, those are the initials) on a friend's LiveJournal page here (my comment is down a bit.)

The Commonist Press

A recent posting on The Belmont Club uses the Tragedy of the Commons as an analogy to discuss the press in general, and the recent Koran-flushing scandal in particular. I thought it particularly apt and I posted a comment. Belmont Club has a pretty good readership but I was something like comment number 40 so you can figure that only a small number of people will see it -- say a thousand. Since I spent a bit too much of my lunch hour writing the comment I decided to post it here, too. That way it will reach 1003 readers.

Here it is:

The Tragedy of the Commons analogy is amazingly apt here. In its original form it referred to a grazing area close to town that everyone could use occasionally to graze livestock when it was brought to market to be sold. It was generally understood that everyone would be better off if the commons was sensibly managed so that the grass was not destroyed by overgrazing. On the other hand, if the expectation was that other users could not be trusted -- if the destruction of the grass was inevitable -- then each farmer was left with the decision whether it would be his livestock that was fatter and closer to town or someone else's.

The various players in the media all draw on a common pool of prestige and influence. There is a general understanding that their industry would be better off if news stories were more thououghly vetted, with more consideration given to their effects and less obvious partisan bias. There is considerable evidence that this pool of public esteem has been drawn down alarmingly. A recent poll showed that four out of ten people agreed with a statement that "The Press is too free." Sadly, the members of the press seem to share this low opinion of their colleagues. As they see it, the question is not whether politically motivated leaks will go public, that is believed to be inevitable once the leaker starts shopping the story around -- the damage to the reputation of the US is already done; the people who will be killed in the riots in Afghanistan are as good as dead already; those already sickened by the whoredom of the press had best look for another restroom -- someone will run with the story. The only question was whether Newsweek will get the "scoop" or if it will go to someone else.

Blue Plate Special in Mayberry

People who are into television trivia will generally tend to know that Mount Airy, North Carolina, is the home town of Andy Griffith and that Mayberry, the setting of the Andy Griffith Show, is a lightly fictionalized version of Mount Airy. What most people don't know is that Mt Airy has another odd distinction. It appears to be the only place on Earth where you can get a "Ground Steak Sandwich" of the sort they serve there.

Every time I am in Mount Airy I have to eat a Ground Steak Sandwich. I don't particularly like them, mind you, they're not actually very good, but they are so damned peculiar that I simply can't resist. A "Ground Steak" sandwich sounds like it would be just like a hamburger, only made with a better cut of beef, but that's not it at all. It is made with with loose-browned ground beef like a Sloppy Joe except that the tangy tomato sauce is replaced with a thick white sauce. Or, to borrow a military term, it is S.O.S. on a burger bun with a bit of slaw and a slice of tomato.

I had lunch in Mount Airy yesterday and I took a picture of my lunch [!] for my blog. I asked both my waitress and the young man who took my money whether they were aware of any place on earth where you could buy a Ground Steak Sandwich more than twenty miles from the center of downtown Mount Airy. They both said they had heard of a restaurant in Cherokee that serves them (200 miles) but added that the owner was originally from Mt Airy.

I should add that Mount Airy is a pleasant place to visit if you are in the area. It is a small North Carolina town in the foothills of the Appalacian mountains which gets a bit of a boost from Andy Griffith tourism but not enough to lose its soul. [Yes, I am thinking of Gatlinburgland, the themepark built on the hollowed out shell of Gatlinburg, Tennessee -- a nice little town destroyed by tourism.] Mount Airy's Bluebird Diner on Main Street is an excellent place for lunch. Their food, except as noted here, is quite good and their onion rings are world class. If you are with a group you might want to order one Ground Steak Sandwich (detail) for the table. That way everyone can see it but nobody has to eat it.

[No, a Ground Steak Sandwich is not on The R Factor Diet!]

Helping the Tree -- Not Hugging it,

Part Two in a series. Part one is here.

In some of the stories about Earth Day I have heard commentators describing the whole week as Earth Week, apparently feeling that Earth Day isn't enough. As I implied in a previous posting I think one day is plenty. Interestingly, right after Earth Day I had an opportunity to see environmental action first hand -- action of a sort of which I altogether approve. Over the weekend I attended the Spring 2005 meeting of Carolinas Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), an organization dedicated to restoring the blighted American Chestnut to the forests of the eastern United States.

Together with my siblings I own some property in the mountains of North Carolina and I became curious about American Chestnuts when my forester pointed out some Chestnut sprouts to me. He said they make excellent walking sticks because they grow to about the right size and then die of the blight. I did a bit of research and found that there is an effort underway to restore the Chestnut and, more to the point, it is a largely private effort where individuals can participate and actually help. The more I learned, the more I realized that I want to restore these trees to my property in the mountains (and, if I can talk them into it, to my neighbor's properties) because Chestnuts grew there once and they ought to be there again.

I don't live on the mountain property [yet -- I may build a house there when I retire ] and it will be somewhat difficult to offer any direct help with the breeding effort. [And there is my black thumb to consider, too.] But I do hope to be able to provide a small amount of financial support and to spread the word -- as I am doing now.

The meeting I attended two weeks ago was held on the campus of Clemson University. Presentations were made by researchers -- a geneticist employed by TACF, a professor at the University and graduate students -- and by volunteers helping with the breeding effort. It was a wonderfully non-political event. One of the graduate students stumbled a bit over one of his PowerPoint slides; he was discussing drought resistance and he didn't want to touch on climate change -- a politically charged side-issue that he didn't want to get into.

I don't want to give the impression that this was some sort of right-libertarian lovefest. The professors from Clemson were state government employees and TACF is not averse to a bit of taxpayer money from time to time if they can wrangle it. But the meeting was all about action and not at all about activism. It was a collection of people working to solve a problem -- not a collection of people demanding that it be solved, or more typically, demanding that some action be forbidden because of a problem it might theoretically cause.

Most (all?) of the scientists there had started their careers working on the genetics of corn. They had moved on to other areas because, as one of them said, "There are plenty of people working on corn" and they felt that other areas might need them more. It was refreshing to see environmental concern and effort that was so divorced from the reflexive anti-corporate, and anti-technology biases so often characterizes "environmentalist" events. These guys had no problem with using biotechnology to grow bigger, better, faster growing crops. The money is good working in corn but the field is crowded. If you can make enough money to support yourself working with fruit trees -- even though it doesn't pay as well -- that's fine too. And if you have some extra time you can devote to working pro bono, or mostly pro bono with the American Chestnut -- even better.

As I said, one of the things that I liked about the meeting was that it wasn't at all political. That graduate student -- shifting and fidgeting because the historical trends in rainfall in the Appalachians might sound like climate change -- probably has opinions about the issue he was avoiding, but he was right to avoid making those opinions known. That wasn't what his presentation was about.

In keeping with that spirit I have separated my posting into two parts. In this part I have allowed myself the luxury of socio-political commentary. In the other part -- The American Chestnut - History and Hope -- I tried not to do so. My hope is that people who do not share my political viewpoint may still find the other part useful.

9/11 and the Bossa Nova

The Daily Kos has posted an article laying out a rather tenuous argument that Ronald Regan Caused 9/11. In response Little Green Footballs posted a link to it and considerable comment has been made there. Hundreds of comments have been posted and only a few of them are worth reading. It gets pretty silly in these threads after a while. As evidence I offer my latest comment (with which I am trying to stop).

Mongoose,

No, BabbaZee has a point. The Bossa Nova is clearly implicated in 9/11.

Bassa Nova is Portugese for "New Wave". In France La Nouvelle Vague refers to a movement in the film industry in the 1950s and 1960s associated with the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and film-makers François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette, among others.

The French New Wave drew heavily on the philosophy of Existentialism which resonated with the French people who were deeply conflicted about their roles in the Nazi occupation. Godard was the leading theorist of the group and his breathtakingly-odd film, Alfaville was a clear inspiration to Hollywood when they were looking for inspiration for the next generation of the Star Trek series.

The creators of Star Trek TNG clearly took three things from Alfaville: a science fictional setting, the name of the captain/director [Jean-Luc Godard/Picard], and the word "Vague" (from Nouvelle Vague although they seem to have taken the English usage sense of it).

Just as Existentialism was the philosophical basis for the French New Wave, a "Vague" Liberalism was the creed of Jean-Luc Picard's Enterprise. Sensing that a foil was needed to make so vapid and indistinct a philosophy visible, the writers at Paramont introduced the Klingon Empire. Unlike the endlessly tiresome Vulcans the Klingons never overcame their warlike natures, instead they had an uprising and killed all their barbers -- this led to an the endless sequence of bad-hair days which they used to become black-leather clad intergalactic biker-warriors with deplorable table manners.

Osama Bin Laden appears to have clearly felt a kinship with the more-authoritarian Klingon Empire and it infuriated him that they were unable to crush the Federation Infidels. It cannot have escaped him that the words "petrolium" (rock oil) and "dilithium" (two stone element) were similar in construction and that the country of his birth (Saudi Arabia) provided much of the dilithium used by the hated Federation.

An episode that featured Lt. Commander Worf trying to dance was the last straw. He called together the key players in al Qaeda (loosely modeled on Television Actors Equity) and told them about his insights gained from the Great Satan's SF TV show and how this episode had offended him. It's impossible to know exactly what was said in the conversation between Bin Laden and his planners but we can take a clue from the prophetic song of Eydie Gorme.

(Now was it the moon?)
No, no, the bossa nova
(Or the stars above?)
No, no, the bossa nova
(Now was it the tune? )
Yeah, yeah, the bossa nova
(The dance of Jihad)

Update

I'm still trying to stop -- or at least to cut back. I was unable to resist commenting on a response by a user who calls himself "Gee Wiz"

WTF are you talking about? You make no sense to me. To compare the current world political climate to a TV series, makes me think your conclusions are foolish. Even if, a connection could be established(a big IF), how could you even begin to think that it applies to our current world political problem?

Gee Whiz, Gee Wiz,

I am amazed that, in one short paragraph, you manage both to perceive my point perfectly and to miss it altogether.

Based on his odd diction, his problems with commas and his blindness to irony, I have two theories about Mr. Wiz. Theory 1: English is not his first language and he comes from a part of the world where, like the Thorn Bird's Song, each individual only gets to perceive irony once in his life, for a few seconds just before the lights go out forever. Theory 2: Gee Wiz is 12.