Review: Soundfly SD WMA/MP3 Player Car Fm Transmitter for SD Card, USB

My car is eight years old and it has a very adequate sound system -- one that was pretty nice in its day -- but it is not MP3 friendly. The CD player won't play MP3 encoded disks. It has no USB input port, and no auxiliary inputs for an external MP3 player. I do have a cassette player in my car. and a cassette adapter is an option, but then I have to figure out how to keep my MP3 player charged on long trips. This is starting to get into a lot of wires to fumble with in my car.

Enter the Soundfly. In principle the Satechi Soundfly MP3 player and FM Transmitter is everything I should need in order to add all the missing features to my car's sound system. It is a small device that plugs into your cigarette adapter. It has a built-in MP3 player that works through the FM radio in your car. It will play music or audio books from a USB thumb drive or from an SD memory card. It also has a standard jack for an input that it will also transmit to your FM radio so you can use it with an external MP3 player, or a computer, or your phone, or whatever.

One theoretically handy feature is that when you are using its built-in MP3 player it will remember which track you were on and resume at that point when you power it back up after a stop. What should be even better if you listen to audio books is the ability to set a bookmark so it will restart at exactly the place in the chapter you were at when you stopped for gas. If you are thinking about buying the device as Satechi currently sells it you should know that the first feature--going back to the same track you were on--works great, but the second feature--setting a bookmark--is mostly useless due to a firmware bug that prevents its use past the first few minutes of a long chapter. More on the firmware bug later but first a few more impressions:

The FM modulator in the Soundfly is the best I have ever used. Most FM transmitters for your car hiss and buzz and fail to block out competing external signals which, for some reason, always seem to be the sort of obnoxious hip-hop which is most unwelcome in the middle of you Jane Austin audio book. But with the Soundfly I simply own 88.5 on the FM dial as my personal private frequency.

If your radio is compatible with the radio data standards the Soundfly will display the MP3 tag information on your radio's information display. My radio is not compatible so I can't speak to this feature. All I have to navigate with is the three-digit display on the unit itself which briefly shows the directory number and track number on your memory card or thumb drive when you enter a navigation command and usually shows the FM frequency.

The unit itself has a few control buttons but many of the buttons you will need for audiobooks--fast-forward, fast-reverse, next and previous track and folder--are all on the small remote control. In general I think remote controls for use in your car are silly but this one works ok and there is, I guess, something to be said for a hand held device where you can use muscle memory to find the buttons instead of taking your eyes off the road to look at something plugged into your cigarette lighter socket.

As to the firmware bug I mentioned it happens when the unit is performing operations that require a timestamp in the file it is playing. My guess is that the variable or register they are using will not hold enough bits to save a timestamp past, say, the fifteen minute mark in a track. If you have a single track that plays longer than fifteen minutes the Soundfly will play it fine as long as it is not interrupted but if you try to save a bookmark past the fifteen minute mark it will fail to save it, and if you try to fast forward past the fifteen minute mark it will jump backwards to somewhere near the start of the track. This means that if you have a thirty minute chapter and a twenty-five minute commute you will arrive at work with five minutes of chapter left to play and, unless you sit in your car and listen to the end of the track before you report for work you will spend most of your ride home trying to get back to the point where you left off.

There are several books where I simply never heard the end of a few chapters and others that I only heard because I listened to them on my computer after I had arrived home. It is a maddening process. Your objective is to fast-forward to minute fourteen -- just before the unit will get lost -- and then repeat eleven minutes you have already heard to get to the part where you wanted to set a bookmark but couldn't. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is no way to know when you have reached minute fourteen and if you go too far it will skip back to near the start of the chapter and you have to start over.

So, the bottom line is that if you want it for music (where a track seldom runs over fifteen minutes) you are golden. Buy the Soundfly SD, you will love it. If, on the other hand, you are looking for something for audio books and/or podcasts then you shouldn't consider the Soundfly until such time as they fix the firmware. I had mine for three months, during which time the long-suffering Satechi customer support guys were promising me a replacement with corrected firmware "Real Soon Now" but they finally said they were struggling with the firmware upgrade and wanted to refund my money. Since I really like their FM transmitter I requested, instead, that they replace the unit with a similar one they offer that is designed to work with Sandisk Sansa MP3 players. I have a Sansa E250 that it should work with. Hopefully, with my E250 and a Satachi FM tranmitter and car charger I should be good to go. But I still plan to pester Satechi tech support about the Soundfly firmware upgrade. It was supposed to be exactly what I wanted. It was a near miss. I'll buy another one if they ever make one that works.

Mohammed (P B U H, P B & J)

When I opened my sandwich this morning to add more jelly I found this miraculous image of the Prophet Mohammed (P B U H, P B & J). I thought about selling it on eBay (so I could retire early) but I was hungry, so...

The Cheap Critic: War of Frogs and Dragons -- Disney Animation vs. Dreamworks

I've been interested in the competition between Disney and SKG Dreamworks ever since Jeffrey Katzenberg was booted from the helm at Disney in the early 1990s, teamed up with a Steven Spielberg and David Geffin to form SKG studios, and started to crank out competitors for everything that had been in Disney's pipeline at the time that he left the company. At first, Dreamworks' animated products were simply tit-for-tat responses to Disney -- Disney was about to release Toy Story II and Dreamworks rushed out Small Soldiers, Disney's A Bugs Life was answered with Dreamworks' Antz -- and in all cases the Dreamworks product just wasn't quite as good. But after a while Dreamworks Animation developed their own pipeline and started to make something besides bizarro Disney films and their product began to improve -- a gradual improvement that has continued until their best work now offers real competition for Katzenberg's one-time employer.

Their latest animated offerings offer a case in point: Disney's Princess and the Frog and Dreamworks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon show both studios in action. Here are my impressions:

The Princess and the Frog



In The Princess and the Frog, Disney returns to hand-drawn animation after a long series of computer generated and/or computer assisted animated features. Computer animation has improved in recent years and has reached the point where there is no compelling reason to prefer hand-drawn animation over the stuff done with computers. But the hand drawn product does have a different look and, in an industry where most animation is done on computers, the hand drawn animation in The Princess and the Frog is, at the same time, nostalgic and oddly fresh; it is beautifully drawn and animated, especially in the sequences at the beginning and the end that evoke the grace and charm of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, and in several fantasy sequences that are homages to artist Aaron Douglas. (Douglas was a luminary of that outpouring of African-American art, music and literature in the 1920s and -30s that was known as the Harlem Renaissance).

Jazz is one of the themes that runs through the film and the plot is a jazzy variation on the story of the princess whose kiss frees a prince from the enchantment that turned him into a frog. In this version, our heroine, Tiana, far from being a princess, is the daughter of a working-poor black family -- her mother works as a seamstress for the richest family in town (the La Bouffs) and her father has passed away leaving her his recipe for gumbo and his dream of opening a restaurant. Opposite her is prince Naveen, (who really is a prince.) He is a charming, carefree but largely useless vagabond who would rather be a musician than a prince, and has gotten himself turned into a frog by hanging around the sketchy parts of town where he ran into an ambitious voodoo man. They meet at at a party thrown by Tiana's friend, spoiled but good-hearted Charlotte La Bouff, who is determined to marry the prince, unaware that the handsome figure she is wooing is an impostor, or that the real prince, in frog form, is upstairs hectoring Tiana for a kiss to break his enchantment. Tiana's role as the "princess" in the scene comes from the fact that she has put on one of Charlotte's princess costumes when her own dress had been damaged in one of Disney's obligatory slapstick sequences involving frenetic action and messy food.

From there the story unfolds pretty much as you would expect: Prince Naveen, when his persistence pays off and he is rewarded with a reluctant smooch, is not turned back into himself (possibly because Tiana is not a real princess) but instead, Tiana is turned into a slightly cuter, but equally green frog, and hilarity and adventure ensue.

There is a lot to like about The Princess and the Frog. For one thing, it avoids several obvious cliches. Tiana is Disney's first black "princess" but the film is not at all about her race, and Tiana's best friend, Charlotte, is white, very rich and very spolied but also good-hearted, loyal and generous. There is a wonderful sequence where Tiana rides home on a trolly from the La Bouff's mansion to her family's small house in a poor black neighborhood. The contrast between rich and poor, white and black is quite clear but is drawn with such a light, graceful touch that, rather than showing us an unfair world, we see the gulf that transcendent friendship can span. Disney could easily have dislocated their collective shoulders, patting themselves on the back for completing their set of racially and ethnically diverse princesses but they didn't. Anika Noni Rose and Bruno Campos were very good as the voices of Tiana and Prince Naveen and the other voice actors were all fine. As I mentioned above, the art direction and animation were wonderful and the music is sprightly, if slightly unmemorable.

That said, The Princess and the Frog is not without its problems. It struggles to decide what sort of film it wants to be. It is set in New Orleans early in the last century, during the birth of the jazz culture on which so much of our idea of the cultural life of the city centers, but spends very little time there. Instead, for most of the middle of the film it is bogged down in the Louisiana swamps where our froggy hero and heroine cavort with an all-singing, all-dancing cast of talking animals, splashing their way through rather-too-many musical numbers in an anachronistic folksy musical style that has little to do with turn of the century New Orleans -- or with Louisiana's Cajun culture -- and very much to do with Disney's desire to include a rehash of popular bits from The Jungle Book.

In these sequences a talking, trumpet-playing alligator named Louie plays the dual roles of Baloo and King Louie from the Jungle Book. This digression into the bayou, I think, was a mistake. New Orleans in the 1920s was a sufficiently musical and magical place for their purposes; a lot more could have been done with New Orleans, its culture and the emergence of Jazz; the screenwriters should not have wandered off into the swamp.

The countless procession of talking animals tends to distract from the magical element of Naveen's transformation. When Tiana first meets him her reaction is "Eeek! A talking frog!" Which is fine and fits in the rather naturalistic portrayal of Turn of the Century New Orleans. But then it's "Eeek. A talking alligator" and "eek, a talking firefly" and "...eek, a ... oh, never mind." We find ourselves in a world where all animals talk and Tiana, apparently, was simply unobservant enough to grow up without noticing.

The Princess and the Frog is very much worth seeing. It is, in fact, a very good film but it misses being a great film through the pacing problems and the stylistic discontinuities introduced when ill-fitting bits of obligatory Disney formula was jammed into a movie that could have stood on its own. Pity, that, but still a good effort overall.

Odd aside: The Teleospouse volunteers at the North Carolina Museum of Art where she gives tours. She immediately recognized the Aaron Douglas inspired sequences although it took her until after the film was over to remember his name. (In the film look for our heroine's daydreams of the restaurant she wants to open someday.) The NCMA has a number of works by Douglas and the one I remember best is a striking gouache and pencil illustration he did for Paul Morand's book "Black Magic" in 1929. The illustration is entitled "Charleston" and it features a black saxophonist being admired by a languid white woman. It also shows a pair of clutching hands in the foreground and a hangman's noose between the man and the woman. Taken all together these elements suggest that the sexual tension between the black musician and the white woman was a dangerous thing. It makes an interesting and ironic contrast to the rather less edgy relationship Disney shows between black Tiana and apparently white Prince Naveen (a musician) in a story with a very similar time and setting.

There is a small image of Douglas' "Charleston" on one of the middle pages of this brochure from a show at the Spencer Museum of Art at The University of Kansas, Lawrence.

How to Train Your Dragon



I will have less to say about Dreamworks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon, mostly because it is the better film of the two and I will find scarcely anything to criticize. It is, perhaps, a bit less ambitious than The Princess and the Frog but it does what it sets out to do effortlessly. I complained that some of the obligatory elements seemed to have been wedged into Princess and the Frog as an ill-fitting afterthought but when I saw How to Train Your Dragon it was only after the film was over, as I took stock mentally of what I had seen, that I noticed that all of the obligatory elements of a kid's adventure film had been present: Geeky kid who is ignored by adults and made fun of by other kids turns out to have the stuff of heros? Check. The cute, popular, tomboy, on whom our hero has a bit of a crush, is the first to notice his change in status? Yep. 3D eye candy? You betcha. Waterslides, roller coasters or swoopy flying scenes? Only the latter, but plenty of it. Animals that are cute and scary at the same time? Yes. Giant monsters? Ohhh yes. Unusual pets? Yep. Lots of stuff cribbed from Harry Potter? Of course. Action sequences with risk of death and dismemberment? Roger that. Death and diememberment? Yes, both actually; I don't remember any main characters that die but the film pays off big time in the dismemberment department.

The film opens with views of a picturesque viking village perched atop rugged cliffs by the sea. In voiceover our hero, Hiccup son of Stoic, sets the scene for us:

This is Berk. It's twelve days north of Hopeless and a few degrees south of Freezing to Death. It's located solidly on the Meridian of Misery. My village. In a word? Sturdy, and it's been here for seven generations, but every single building is new. We have fishing, hunting, and a charming view of the sunset. The only problems are the pests. You see, most places have mice or mosquitoes. We have... dragons.

I won't go to the trouble of summarizing the plot here. From Hiccup's introduction and my list of obligatory kid's adventure film elements you can work out all you need to know about the story, although it is tempting to offer the further suggestion that you can consider How to Train your Dragon to be a sequel, of sorts, to Beowulf, done as a kid's coming of age tale. Gerald Butler, who plays Hiccup's dad played Beowulf in the 2005 film Beowulf and Grendel and he seems to have brought much of the situation to this film with him.

So please do see How to Train your Dragon, if you get a chance. It is quite the best kid's film in years, and saying that is to undersell it because you don't have to be a kid to enjoy it. It is wonderfully written with engaging characters and real excitement. The 3D animation is top notch and adds to the enjoyment without becoming the only reason to see the film -- catch it in 3D if you can (it is well worth the couple of extra bucks) but don't hesitate to watch a flat print if that is all that's available. It's a lovely film. I recommend it.

On balance, I have to hand the win to Dreamworks Animation this time. Disney's film was a worthy effort but they seem a bit off their game. Score one for Katzenberg.

---

I am, once again, semi-cheating on the "Cheap Critic" theme for these two films since I paid full price to see How to Train your Dragon in 3D, but I did see The Princess and the Frog at our local second-run theater. This makes the average ticket price about six bucks: more than I like to pay but not enough to endanger my cheapskate creds.

Curling Mnemonica

Here is the USA -- and particularly here in the southeastern part of the USA -- curling is a sport that one sees briefly during the coverage of the Winter Olympics, idly wondering "what's with the brooms?" and forgetting altogether for another four years. In these parts, most people are almost as vague about curling as they are about the game of cricket, but unlike cricket, it is safe to ask about curling if you run into a fan. A cricket match can run several days, and the average explanation of how the game is played can seem much longer and leave the idle questioner with only one new fact: he shouldn't have asked. Curling, on the other hand, seems to be about having fun and drinking beer although the Olympic media coverage of the latter aspect seems spotty.



John J Miller, of the Corner at National Review Online suggests visiting a page with ten great curling songs to listen to while we wait for the next Winter Olympics. They are more entertaining than one might suppose. I've promoted a couple of favorites to this posting but by all means click through to check out the rest.

I'll close with some lyrics from The Curling Song by the Arrogant Worms:

Curlers, underneath your two feet
the whole yin/yang of life comes to pass.
For there's a slippy side to make you go real quickly
and a grippy side so you don't fall on your ass.

Indicators of a Modern American Conservative

Two friends of mine (Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver) have hashed out a list of what they feel are fourteen key indicators of a current-day American conservative. Here they are:


1. Optimism about the future and the courage to face its challenges

2. The complete rejection of utopianism or human-achievable perfection -- this one was suggested by Brad; I hadn't thought of it, but Brad is right!

3. Adventurousness, dreaming big, achieving the "impossible"

4. Individualism, in contrast to collectivism

5. Capitalism, in particular, small-business entrepeneurship

6. Strong tendency towards preserving American traditions, whether good or bad

7. Patriotism

8. Religiosity

9. A strong belief that personhood begins at conception, thus that abortion is nearly always morally bad

10. A strong tendency to reject evolution by natural selection as denying God and the spiritual nature of Man

11. Belief in the legislating of virtue

12. Deep respect for and appreciation of the American military

13. Respect for the democratic decisions of the people -- extreme distaste for oligarchy (especially kritarchy)

14. Distrust of foreigners, especially immigrants


Read the whole thing in Dafydd'd blog, Big Lizards, here.

I wrote a tedious and overlong comment in response which I have decided to post here as well. (Why should only Dafydd's reader suffer?) Here it is:

My rule-of-thumb notion of a "conservative" is a person exactly like me when I am surrounded by libertarians. Contrariwise, a "libertarian" is me when I am surrounded by conservatives. As a Frank Meyer-style fusionist I think that the silly schism between libertarians and American conservatives can and should be patched over, and whenever I am surrounded by members of one group I feel the need to serve as an ambassador for the other. Since you and (especially) Brad tend to identify more with libertarians than conservatives I will be using myself as a model of conservative perfection for purposes of this discussion and as I visit each point I will either admit, humbly, that it describes me perfectly or complain that you have larded your list with not-necessarily-conservative vices to justify your rejection of the label "conservative". Feel free to bear that in mind.

Trait 1 -- Optimism: This one is odd but mostly true. More on it later.

Trait 2 -- Antiutopianism: Perhaps the reason that Brad needed to point this out to you is because you didn't derive your list, as you state, from first principles. This is the first principle of modern American conservatism.

Trait 3 -- Adventurousness: This is related to traits 1 and 4. Individualist optimism tends to manifest itself as adventurousness.

Trait 4 -- Individualism: Given its roots in classical liberalism this is a key attribute of most variants of American conservatism.

Trait 5 -- Entrepreneurial Capitalism: Quite right. It is merely adventurousness expressed in its economic variant.

Trait 6 -- American Traditionalism: I'm something of a traditionalist and I must quibble here a bit. I don't think any traditionalist would agree that we seek to preserve "bad" traditions. We merely give the traditional modes of thought and behavior the benefit of a the doubt until the evidence become persuasive.

Trait 7 -- Patriotism: Certainly a virtue associated with American conservatives (and occasionally a vice as well.)

Trait 8 -- Religiosity: Religiosity is closely related to populism and populists are ideological nomads. It is true that they are currently camped in conservative territory -- so for the moment you are right -- but they are fickle and may move on at any moment.

Trait 9 -- Personhood of the Unborn: There are pro-choice conservatives but this seems fair since there is a strong correlation with other markers for conservatism. This is a difficult issue for fusionist compromise. I suppose I might support a woman's right to kill her baby provided that she understood that that is precisely what she is doing, and that all arguments to the contrary are rubbish.

Trait 10 -- Creationism: Um, really? You mean to tell me that something like the majority of the conservatives that you guys know are creationists? Weird.

Trait 11 -- Legislating Virtue: This libertarian talking point is a truism that is not particularly true. If you look at the seven deadly sins (Catholic version) -- sloth, lust, anger, greed, pride, envy and gluttony -- you will find liberals and conservatives have split the list fairly evenly for their proscriptive legislative agendas.

Trait 12 -- Respect for the Military: Currently true but, as I am sure you know, historically problematical as a marker for conservatism.

Trait 13: Respect for Democracy: I must admit I had to hit Wikipedia for "kritarchy." I was initially inclined to mostly agree here but on further reflection I have decided you are mistaken. With a few obscure exceptions such as those very few people who know what the word republican means (most of whom, coincidentally, tend to vote "Republican") all political organizations will extol "the will of the people" when they are winning and tend to be OK with judicial activism when it is on their side. "Conservatives" do it, which is disappointing since they should know better, but no more often than the other side.

Trait 14 -- Nationalist Xenophobia: Yes, there is rather more of it in conservative circles than I would like. It is an understandable, but nonetheless unfortunate reaction to militant internationalism, multiculturalism and affirmative action on the other side. It irks me because the anger is misdirected and wasted -- charging the cape and ignoring the matador.

Getting back to the concept of conservative optimism, it is quite real and, in a round-about way, a consequence of conservative antiutopianism. Modern liberalism is officially more optimistic than conservatism -- after all they believe in the perfectibility of human institutions and the conservatives don't -- but that belief sets liberals up for a lifetime of disappointment. Conservatives, on the other hand, expect to have to muddle through in a not-altogether-satisfactory environment. Experience makes liberals cynical as they fall short of their hopes, while conservatives are mostly pleased to find how much can be done in an imperfect and non-perfectible world. This cheerful but conflicted optimism is a key indicator of a conservative mindset and is almost-always present, even in officially-dour paleo-cons such as John Derbyshire of NR.

Avatar

This review is, technically, not part of my "Cheap Critic" series since I actually coughed up the big bucks to see Avatar in 3D during its first run and it has not yet quite hit the local second-run cinema as I type. That all being said, it would fit rather nicely in the series since Avatar is at heart a remake of a 1970s-era movie that was never made for obvious technical reasons. More on that later, but first a public service request...

P L E A S E

If, like me, you are a conservative or right-leaning libertarian, to enhance your enjoyment of the film and for the sake of other members of the audience, please remember to turn off your liberal bullshit detectors before you enter the theater. For SF films I usually set mine to the "Star Wars" setting -- its lowest level where it only goes off for the most egregious drivel -- but even at that level it went off three times during Avatar. After the second time I set it to vibrate but it still activated so violently near the end of the film that several California natives fled the theater believing an earthquake was in progress.

For a lifelong science fiction fan of a certain age, watching Avatar is like a party where your best friends from college show up, all looking happy and well off, and you spend a couple of hours reminiscing about what used to be cool back in the day. Every now and then the doorbell rings and instead of another old friend you find a door-to-door evangelist handing out pamphlets about Gaea but you quickly shoo them off with "Not now, I'm having a party," and you get back into the groove.

You see, with the admitted, very notable exception of the film technology used to make it, there is nothing whatsoever new about Avatar. All the elements that make it up -- its plot, its themes, its visual style, its virtues and its vices -- can be traced to the popular science fiction and fantasy milieu of the mid-1970s. It is the product of sensibilities formed in the '70s finally given an outlet to express itself in film. Since I too am a product of those times, Avatar reminds me strongly of a lot of my favorite stuff -- things I have wanted to see on the screen for almost half a century; how could I not think it is swell?

Here are a few example of the kind of stuff I mean: To start with there is the visual imagery in the film. If you read what Cameron and his conceptual artists say about how it was developed you will hear about flying creatures modeled after sea life and floating mountains inspired by the Chinese Huang Shan mountains but that is just after-the-fact smoke-blowing; the truth of the matter is that they cribbed it all from progressive-rock album artist Roger Dean. Here's a link to an io9.com article about Dean's influence on Avatar -- "Did Prog Rock's Greatest Artist Inspire Avatar? All Signs Point To Yes" -- click on all the images and see what you think.


One of many Dean images that io9 finds similar to Avatar.

As for the plot, themes, etc. you can easily construct the screenplay for Avatar by cutting bits out of several novels from the '60s and '70s and scotch taping them together. You start with Harry Harrison's short novel, Deathworld, published in 1960, for the broad outlines of the plot. I'd outline the commonalities for you but that would constitute major spoilers, both for the book and the movie -- they are that close. Then, for the themes and some details of Na'vi civilization you throw in Ursula K LeGuin's short novel, "The Word for World is Forest", 1976 (based on her Hugo-winning Novella published in "Again, Dangerous Visions" in 1972), then to get the right tension between things technological and maqical add a dash of Andre Norton -- say, "Judgement on Janus" which she wrote in 1964 -- and borrow a dollop of Ann McCaffrey's Dragonflight -- 1968, from her Hugo-winning 1966 novelette, Weyr Search -- for the dragon-riding bits, and finally, for some of the military technology -- but none of the philosophy -- throw in just a pinch of Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel, Starship Troopers.

With the possible exception of Roger Dean I don't blame Cameron for not crediting his influences. It suffices to say that all of these sources had a huge effect on speculative fiction during that period and that Cameron is a product of the times. One hears Avatar criticized as derivative, and not without some justification, but it is derived from material from other media from forty years ago. If finally getting around to making the sort of film that has waited a generation for technology to catch up is to be derivative then I can't see what is wrong with it.

There are a few minor nits to pick aside from Cameron's very successful capturing of the pre-new-age, mildly cretinous liberal vibe of the '70s. Avatar obviously wants to be "hard" Science Fiction but, with Cameron's penchant for action rather than exposition, it lacks the Mr Wizard moments necessary to wrap a gloss of technobabble around its more magical elements. Cameron had the material (see the explanation of "unobtanium" in the Avatar wiki, for instance) but he just refused to use it. You could vastly improve the film's hard SF creds by having one of the "scientists" who our hero pals around with spend sixty seconds on the properties and importance of Unobtanium.

And, of couse, it would be nice if the script didn't suck in all the ordinary ways; none of the characters has any motivation for his or her actions -- the bad guys do bad things because they are bad and, conversely, our hero is heroic because he is our hero -- and they all appear to be as dumb as a pile of rocks -- their synapses apparently being dedicated to staying in character with none left over for anything like problem solving.

But, as I said, these are all nits. Films like Avatar require the willing suspension of disbelief for their enjoyment and Avatar only occasionally makes that difficult. It is great fun, especially if you are old enough to remember the 1970s. I recommend it highly but don't forget to turn off that bullshit detector so your ears don't whistle like a tea kettle and disturb other members of the audience.

A bit of random reading for making your own cut-and-paste script for Avatar:

Harrison’s Deathworld and Cameron’s Avatar from the Crotchety Old Fan

Full text of Deathworld by Harry Harrison - Project Gutenberg

Cover from Paperback Judgement on Janus by Andre Norton

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin -- Wikipedia

The Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey -- Wikipedia

2009 Christmas Holiday Newsletter

I am writing this first paragraph in a hotel room in Williamsburg, Va.. Irene and dad are watching White Christmas on TV and I am dividing my attention between Bing, Danny and my writing. Christopher and his fiancee, Reid, are with us for a short vacation to see Colonial Williamsburg and the Mariner's Museum in Newport News. (More on the fiancee bit later.) Today we did the Mariner's Museum. They have a wonderful exhibit on Civil War ironclads with the actual turret and the propeller from the Monitor on display. The exhibit is fascinating and endlessly historical but it can be a lot to see in one day and we are beat. If my prose lacks its usual verve I blame it on the the Monitor, the Merrimack and Irving Berlin.

Since this is a Christmas newsletter I should mention that Colonial Williamsburg has a complicated, pluperfect subjunctive relationship with Christmas. Tourists expect to see how the colonists decorated for Christmas but the historical fact is that they didn't decorate at all. Christmas was a very minor holiday in the colony of Virginia. As the reenactors explain it: “The colonists didn't decorate for Christmas, but if they had these are the sort of decorations they might have used.” They don't mention that the colonists would have found the idea of decorating for Christmas rather scandalous; A proper, protestant Virginian would not make that much fuss over a suspiciously Catholic holiday.

One thing I took away from this struggle for a historically-feasible colonial Christmas is that you can mix and match the tunes and lyrics of many Christmas songs. In Jefferson's time the the song “Joy to the World” existed but with a different tune; the familiar music would not be written for a century – so the reenactors led us in singing “Joy to the World” to the tune of “Oh God our Hope in Ages Past” – another “common meter” hymn that did exist in colonial times. Many of the religious Christmas songs are C.M. and you can mix and match words and tunes. Try it yourself: Sing “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” to the tune of “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.” I'll wait.

...

Back? Good. It''s bit like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time but it works.

OK then, enough of that – on with the news. Parts of this may be review for some of you. Last year's Christmas cards didn't get out until the Fourth of July and had a limited release – so I am repeating much of the news from the that issue here as well. If the information that follows seems a bit familiar, feel free to skim.

Since my last Christmas newsletter Christopher graduated from the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, with a four-year degree in Graphics Design. He has returned to the Raleigh area where he works (and works and works) as a graphics designer for Capstrat – a communication company that specializes in corporate communications (fliers, brochures, ads, etc.). During this time also, Chris met and wooed a young lady named Reid who has agreed to become his wife next fall.) Reid is finishing a PhD in Dye Chemistry at the NC State University College of Textiles. Those of you who attended Chris' cousin Jessica's wedding had a chance to meet Reid ... and she got to meet quite a bit of Chris's family as well, but, inexplicably, having met the family she still said yes.

Amber has moved to St Petersburg, Florida, and is attending the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Bradenton. Amber’s boyfriend, Lee – Lee the Younger, or Not-Quite-So-Big Lee, or Lee With Hair – has also moved to St Petersburg where his is currently looking for work. If you know of any west-coast Florida opportunities for a young man with a PhD in chemistry let us know. (Yes, both kids are dating PhD level chemists – go figure.) Amber is working very hard at her studies and seems to be doing well. Her mother and I are elated with Amber's progress but do miss having her in North Carolina where we enjoyed the opportunities to see her more often.

Irene still manages the Cheese case at the Harris Teeter Super Flagship store in Cary. The cheese biz is not altogether immune to the slow economy and the trips on the corporate jet to visit cheese manufacturers have not been in the picture during the last year. Hopefully, once the recession lets up a bit, Irene can get a bit more traction with her ideas to take Harris Teeter to new levels of cheesiness. In the meanwhile, Irene still enjoys her volunteer work as a Docent at the North Carolina Museum of Art, which has temporarily closed most of their galleries while they move into a new (huge) facility. During the move Irene isn’t giving many tours but the classes on the collection continue so she, and the other docents, can hit the ground running when the museum reopens next April.

As for Lee (that would be me) I am finishing up an assignment working for the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources Ecosystem Enhancement Program and will be starting a new assignment for the NC DOT at the end of January. I was briefly laid off this summer while the state of North Carolina attempted to find funds to pay my employer, Keane, for my services. I was rehired by the same employer to work on the same job after three months and, between severance and a few weeks of unemployment pay I saw very little financial impact. The experience did afford me an opportunity to experience the recession first hand and not feel left out. As I write this I have returned from Williamsburg, having had a swell time, and am now typing on my laptop in the doctor's office. Oops... Nurse just called my name; back in a minute...

Ok, I'm back now. Where was I?

Oh yes, family news. Almost over, I promise. On our trip to the Williamsburg area we got a chance to try out dad's new bionics. I think his cataract repair was done since my last Christmas letter and his pacemaker is brand new. It was only about two weeks old when we took him out hiking all over the eastern half of Virginia. I am pleased to report that his color and energy are much improved and he no longer walks into walls in dimly lit rooms. In fact, with his new bionics, while we were waiting for the Grand Illuminations fireworks to start he was able to slog across an uneven, and slightly muddy Williamsburg parade field in near-total darkness, never tripping over freezing tourists huddled in folding chairs, and still have enough energy to participate in the discussion of which restrooms would have the smallest queues.

Alaska Cruise: For our 30th anniversary (in 2008), Irene and I took our second cruise of the Inland Passage of Alaska. This time we took my father and the kids along. We sailed from Seattle and while we were there we had nice visits with Mike and Sandra, friends from our FSU days who we hadn’t seen in 30 years, and also with “Dex Quire”, a fellow blogger with whom I have struck up an online friendship through mutual weblog commentary. (http://dexquire.blogspot.com)




Washington DC: Dad came up in fall 2008 for a Thanksgiving visit and, while he was here, we drove up to Washington to visit his friend George and to wander around the Smithsonian a bit. George and Lenore Cohen were gracious hosts and we had a wonderful time. The first day we were there we took dad with us to see some of the sights but the second day we left him to visit with George and Lenore which he seemed to enjoy. The weather was perfect – more or less sunny days with light snow in the evenings.

Dad and George went to high school together (Woodrow Wilson High, class of 1944) and also went to George Washington Medical School (class of 1950). George invited Dean Martin, another GW 1950 graduate, for dinner and a mini-reunion. (This should have been in last years letter but there wasn't one and I love the photos...).



George and Dad Dad, George and their Classmate, Dean Martin

Hoping this finds all well.

Lee, Irene, Christopher and Amber

The Wizards of Thaws

The clip above is the climactic scene from the Wizard of Oz. If you have never seen Oz you should be warned that the clip contains spoilers... oh, and welcome to Earth, stranger; we Earthmen have seen the film an average of seventeen times each.

I was reminded of the self-styled Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz while reading this article from Reason Online about the scandal that has arisen around some questionable practices among climate researchers at several prestigious scientific institutions, most notably the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, a scandal that some pundits refer to as Climategate.

The Reason Online article is well written, fair, and worth reading, especially if you haven't been following the Climategate story. Basically, the scandal involves a number of computer files, including emails between climate researchers discussing ways to manipulate the data to eliminate the bits that don't fit the theories, obviously fudged data sets, and snippets of sketchy software that was used to produce reports showing alarming levels of global warming -- things which, taken all together, give a disturbing picture of tendentiousness in the selection and processing of the data, processing methodologies of highly dubious scientific merit designed to eliminate ambiguities, and a desire to suppress debate and pervert the peer-review process. The role played by Dorothy's dog, Toto, in Oz was played in Climategate by an anonymous whistleblower who stole the files from the researchers' computers and released them on the Internet.

The global warming skeptics community is obviously delighted with these developments and they have chosen the name Climategate to suggest that the climate scientists have exhibited Nixonian levels of corruption, deceit and abuse of power. I suppose they are right but in saying that I should probably admit that I have always thought that Nixon got a bit of a raw deal. Watergate was wicked, I suppose, but the standards for naughtiness in politics are pretty high and I just can't get that excited about a bit of clumsy political espionage. Ten worse things are done every day without causing any furor at all. And I think that some of the calumny aimed at the climate researchers is equally hyperbolic.

I am sure, for instance, that Dr Phil Jones, who has temporarily stepped down from his post as the head of the CRU while an investigation is carried out, feels a bit ill used -- and not without some reason. He and the other climate researchers were not fudging their data to lie to the public -- quite the opposite, at least to their way of thinking. They were simplifying the data to make a more compelling story for the public and the politicians -- trying to convince them of things that they, themselves, urgently believe.

Activist scientists are often initially drawn to their chosen fields because they see the need for some sort of action. Their belief in the problems they are seeking to solve precedes their studies and guides them. They become experts on their problems and the possible solutions but remain a poor choice to evaluate the urgency of those problems. They wouldn't have devoted years of their lives to studying an unimportant problem and much of their professional prestige is tied up in the perceived urgency of their pet issue. It poses a constant moral hazard to them and it takes a very scrupulous scientist indeed not to yield occasionally to the temptation to exaggerate.

Adding to this temptation is the undeniable fact that a number of the more vocal climate change skeptics are pseudo-scientific cretins who see every cool day as a thoroughgoing refutation of the whole global warming theory. The climate researchers spent weary years answering these critics and gradually developed an us-vs-them mentality and an almost religious devotion to their theories. When the first few years of the past decade were cooler than expected based on their theories the climate researchers knew that the cool spell would prove to be a temporary aberration and that the inevitable upward trend would resume. But they knew also that they would be attacked and the oh-so-important changes they sought in fossil fuel usage would be impeded. So, for the good of the planet they fudged the data to make the cooling spell go away, confident that when the upward trend resumed their minor adjustments would make little difference. But there was a problem with that plan: the expected resumption of the temperature rise did not occur. Year after year for the rest of the decade the temperature rise failed to materialize and the amount of adjustment needed to "hide the decline" kept growing, but the climate researchers had left themselves with no face-saving exit strategy. The pressure built until the recent leak led to a rupture and the whole thing blew up.

Our best hope to get the climate change debate back on a more science-based footing is to avoid ad hominem attacks on the errant researchers. They have been deceptive and self-aggrandizing, but not to an unusually excessive degree. The problem with ad hominem attacks is that they lead to ad hominem defences -- the researchers are not unusually wicked. By attacking them -- and not their findings and methodology -- the opportunity is lost to correct the damage they have done.

When Toto pulled back the curtain and revealed the Wizard to be less than he pretended to be Dorothy accused him of being a very bad man, to which he replied: "Oh no, my dear, I am a very good man; I am merely a very bad wizard." The Climategate scientists are not necessarily bad people, but they are clearly very bad scientists.

Booster's Billions

Brewster's Millions, Wikipedia tells us, is a novel written by George Barr McCutcheon in 1902, originally under the pseudonym of Richard Greaves. It was adapted into a play in 1906, which opened at the Globe Theatre, and the novel or play has been made into a movie nine times. (The YouTube embed above is a snippet from a 1945 version that I like better than the Richard Prior version that may be more familiar to most of you.)

Links: Project Gutenberg Text, Librivox Audio Book

The novel's story revolves around Montgomery Brewster, a young man who inherits a million dollars from his rich grandfather. Shortly after, a rich and eccentric uncle who hated his grandfather also passes away. The uncle's will leaves Brewster with seven million dollars, but only under the condition that he keeps none of the grandfather's money. To inherit the seven million dollars, Brewster is required to spend every penny of his grandfather's million within one year, and end up with no assets or goods gained by his grandfather's wealth at that time. Should he make the deadline, he will earn the full seven million; should he fail, he remains penniless.

Brewster's uncle puts restrictions on how the million must be spent requiring that Brewster demonstrate business sense by obtaining good value for the money he spends, limiting his donations to charity, his losses to gambling, and the value of his tips to waiters and cab drivers. Brewster finds that spending that sort of money sensibly in so short a time frame is not an easy thing -- a full time job, actually -- and much of the interest in reading the book is to see how he manages to do it.

What brings Brewster's Millions to mind right now is that our collective uncle -- Uncle Sam that is -- has decided to give a million of us pretty much the same job: to spend 787 billion dollars as quickly as possible to stimulate the economy while, at the same time, only spending the money on necessary, useful things that we would need to do anyway, only perhaps just not all at once.

There is an active debate going on while I write this about how many jobs have actually been created and/or saved by the stimulus bill. I'll get back to my take on that debate later but for now to avoid getting mired down in needless controversy I will simply take the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" at its stated goals as presented by its sponsors and proponents: to spend 787 billion dollars to create and/or save a million American jobs.

787 billion bucks is a big number -- but then again a million jobs is a big number too, so maybe it's a wash -- one big number divided by another big number can give a small number after all if you do the math. So let's do it then.

Faced with really big numbers -- things like the mass of the sun in grams or the number of carbon atoms in a gnat's ass -- a scientist will generally use scientific notation to avoid big-number fatigue from writing all those zeros before the decimal point. For those of you with a more scientific bent I will restate the stimulus package in scientific notation: that's 7.87x10^11 dollars for 1.00x10^6 jobs or 7.87x10^5 dollars per job, or in conventional notation, $787,000.00 per job created using the stated goals of the stimulus package.

You know, I do OK for myself but there are years where even I don't make that kind of money and, having worked through the math I am forced to consider any attempt to justify the stimulus package as a jobs-creation program to be absurd on its face. But of course, jobs creation is only part of the deal; there is also stimulating the economy (whatever that means,) and investing in "infrastructure," where the term is generally understood to involve spending on pet projects in districts that vote heavily Democratic.

The inevitable answer to my complaint, of course, is that we collectively voted for these guys and so we collectively deserve what we get. Leaving aside my objection that it is not my fault that the collective "we" is often an idiot, I can still wonder: where do they think all that money is going to come from?

I have a theory. I think the majority of the members of congress view wealth in pretty much the same way you would see it in a Scrooge McDuck cartoon if you watch it with the sound off. When they think of private wealth they see a cavernous vault with gold, jewels and currency stacked in untidy heaps which wealthy bankers and insurance company CEOs like to wallow in like a small child in a pile of stuffed animals.



If they confiscate half of Uncle Scrooge's gold then he will still have enough to swim in but it won't be quite as deep -- he might even touch bottom at the shallow end of the vault. But, hey, times are tough and that idle wealth can create a lot of jobs so Scrooge will just have to suck it up.

What they miss, of course, is that Uncle Scrooge might have most of his money committed to industries that employ people -- all, admittedly, working to make him richer yet -- and some of those people might lose their jobs. And remember that Scrooge is a miserly old duck and it is likely that he doesn't pay $787,000 per employee. Three or four people working at real jobs in Duckburg might lose those jobs to create one Brewser's Millions-style job in Washington where the chief responsibility is to look busy whenever an auditor or a Republican comes near. Which is to say, I am skeptical, actually, about the job-creation claims of the supporters of the stimulus package. I think that if you subtract the jobs lost in the private sector from the jobs created in public works projects you will get a lower number than the targeted million job figure.

In closing, lest I be unfair to Scrooge McDuck, the reason I talked about watching the cartoon with the sound off is that the cartoon I linked to goes out of its way to make exactly the points I have accused our congressmen and senators of missing. It's not a bad capule presentation of the economic case for capitalism -- on a third grade level, admittedly, but possibly too difficult for most politicians to grasp.

Here's the second part:

Changing the Atmosphere in International Relations

by Brak Hosing Yomama

The Cheap Critic: New in Town

As a general rule, when you find a film you have never heard of that features actors and/or a director or screenwriter of whom you have heard, you have found yourself a stinkeroo. The film New in Town -- with Renée Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr. as the leads, and with J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson in Spiderman) in a supporting role -- is a case in point. It was released early this year; I don't remember a theatrical run for it and I think the studio may have decided to cut their losses and go straight to video.



As with most films that don't quite work there are parts that are perfectly OK. The acting is fine, for instance -- Zellweger does a good to very good job, Connick is a bit better than OK, and the rest of the cast labor through the script with admirable stoicism that more-or-less works for the mid-winter Minnesota setting. The basic storyline is brutally formulaic but no more so that any number of other romantic comedies; the typical chick-flick doesn't need M. Night Shyamalan-style twists and turns. And the film simply drips with heartwarming niceness and, God knows, we can use more of that in the cinema these days.

If I had to put my finger on the problem I would say that the film's Danish director (Jonas Elmer) hasn't quite got the American sense of humor down pat. He finds a few genuinely funny bits -- rural Minnesotans talk funny and a Miami city girl might be surprised by how cold it gets in the winter -- and he proceeds to pummel us with them endlessly. After about forty minutes one arrives at Yes, yes. That's funny. I get it. Ha. Ha. Do you have another joke?

He is equally ham-handed with the thematic material. Zellweger, you see, is an executive sent to re-tool and downsize the plant that provides the main source of revenue for the town. Her romantic interest, Connick, is the local labor union representative. The get off to a bad start but, as the formula demands, they come around in the end. The management-labor relations theme was laid on thickly. There were times I was reminded of Fritz Lang's Metorpolis -- The HEART must be the MEDIATOR between the HEAD and the HAND. When the semi-evil management team comes up from Miami to confront their now-wayward colleague I half-expected the a robotrix to emerge from the black limos to replace her.

In fairness, I should say that it is a likable movie -- if you really, really try to like it. But you have to put on your Pollyanna dress, sit very still and will yourself to enjoy it. It can be done.

The Cheap Critic: The Fallen Ones

The Fallen Ones is a made-for-TV film (SyFy Channel) that offers an extremely enjoyable, immersive viewing experience... to me and a few of my fiends -- but possibly not to anybody else. My DVR caught it almost a year ago. I watched the first bit of it then told the machine to save it so I could finish it later. I was not particularly excited by the first few minutes and it took me a while to get back to it.



There are two ways a film can offer an immersive experience -- can take you out of yourself for a while. The first way is for the film to provide a transparent window on the story. That way, one moment you are sitting in the theater watching the opening credits, and the next you are in the tomb with Indiana Jones, batting at spider webs while you wade through piles of snakes and dodge blowgun darts that seem to come out of everywhere and nowhere. Making that kind of movie requires a high degree of craft for the writer, director and actors.

The Fallen Ones doesn't offer that kind of immersive experience. It offers another kind. One moment you are sitting on the couch watching the tube and the next you are there on the set with the actors, wondering if this will all look as cheesy in the rushes as it does during the shooting; you finish your bit and wait for the director to yell "CUT", hoping that the caterer's trailer still has any more of yesterday's ham sandwiches which were really good, especially the pickles.

The Fallen Ones is totally opaque. While you are watching it you can think about the script, the wooden dialog, how much fun it must be for young actors to work with well known, semi-retired celebrities, and whether the arid location where the film was made is that lot just outside of L.A. (the one where half the westerns of the forties were shot -- and most of the B-movie science fiction films of the fifties). You are free to daydream about all these things without being particularly distracted by the story line.

By any objective standard the film is dreadful... but many god-awful films tend to be uneven and The Fallen Ones has its odd glimpses of failed potential. For one thing, it has a decent concept (from which an appallingly bad script was written) and a few brief sequences that are really, really good. One sequence in particular sticks in my mind. I won't trouble you with too much of the plot but it deals with a 40-foot tall mummy that is found in the desert southwest. We spend most of the movie waiting for it to come to life and then comes a sequence where we think we have finally seen it. We see something in the distance, lumbering through the darkness, but when we get closer it is... something else. That sequence is wonderfully macabre and, although it lasts less than a minute, quite wonderful. It was worth watching the whole mess just to have seen it.

GOP Has No Clue on Healthcare

If you listen to the congressional debates on health care you will hear the members of the GOP criticizing the plans put forth by the Democrats while offering very few ideas of their own. The Republicans have no idea at all how the country's health care industry should be run, and they know it. That's why they are my guys. All they know, really, is that they haven't a clue. But that's one more thing than the Democrats know, and, actually, may be all they need to know.

Let me explain:

The problem of determining the best, the most efficient, the least expensive and the most humane way to deliver health care to the public is hard -- really, really hard -- and there is nobody in Congress who can do it. That's because the members of Congress are all human and the problem is simply too hard for mere human reason to make much of a dint in it. I suppose, as a theological notion, that God ought to be able to figure it out, but the problem is so difficult that those of weak faith may find it difficult to believe in a being who can solve so knotty a problem -- I mean, divine omniscience is fine as a theory, but surely there are limits...

But until that voice from the sky pipes up and straightens us out we are more or less on our own to figure out what to do. God help us. You should have figured out by now, since I a merely a man, and since I make no claim to have a pipeline to divine wisdom, that I have not the slightest notion what to do about health care -- or more accurately, I do have my opinions (don't we all) but I have no convincing arguments that my opinions are right. I have no plan for health care. But I do have a meta-plan -- a plan about coming up with a plan -- and based on the insight provided by my meta plan I am quite confident that the current administration has it exactly, 180 degrees bass-ackward, wrong.

So here is my meta-plan for health care:

Step one is to give up on the idea that we can figure it out. There isn't going to be any clear, universal, over-arching theory that solves all of our problems. It's not going to happen. We need to get over it. A corollary to this is the realization that all the five-year plans currently being touted for health care are wrong in some important particulars, and many of them are wrong in all particulars. This isn't because the people who formulated the plan are lazy, or stupid, or ignorant, or evil. They have merely taken on a task too difficult for them to accomplish, and their only real fault is a certain lack of intellectual modesty.

Step two is to get more people working on the problem. I'm not talking about a hand full of Czars and blue-ribbon panels here, or even a few thousand politicians or tens of thousands of bureaucrats, what I had in mind was more like, well, everybody. I think we should all run off, willy-nilly in all directions, and look for the best way to manage health care in our own personal lives based on our own individual silly-assed notions of how to go about it.

I admit that result won't be pretty. Since we all have opinions about how the problem should be handled, and since all of our opinions are different, we will find ourselves looking out over a chaotic sea of people doing things that strike us as wrong. And most of them will be wrong (remember that the problem is hard) but some will be less wrong than others and people will notice. After a while clusters will start to form. It is perfectly fair to crib off your next-door neighbor's health care plan. If his plan seems to be working out better than the mess you've made of things then maybe you make your plan look more like his. Maybe you and he and some of your other neighbors team up and pool your resources. Eventually, small pockets of spontaneous order will emerge, but mostly, things will still look pretty much a mess.

While this part of the meta-plan will be characterized as "every man for himself" that's not altogether fair. It's more like every man for himself... and for his family and friends... and for his neighbors, his business associates, and for the people in his care... and when need be for strangers in need who appeal to him directly. But the locus of control would remain with the individual and I would expect him or her to be kind and fair to others.

Finally, step three is the step my more progressive readers have been waiting for -- the step where we harvest the empirical evidence gained by our higgly-piggly experimentation and finally condense it down to a coherent plan. Well, I have some bad news. There is no step three. Step two is all there is. The unfortunate truth is that the messy hodgepodge envisioned in step two is probably the best of all possible worlds -- not perfection, because that is seldom possible -- but the best we are going to ever see.

All the plans for "Universal" health care lose me on the word "Universal." The mess we find ourselves in now stems, in large part, from a near-universal plan for health care that our grandfathers thought up fifty years ago. They devised a targeted plan for big-company wage slaves who worked the same job for forty years, and then retired and were promptly buried with their new gold watch. Using a combination of mandates and tax-incentives they managed to herd a majority of the public into employer-provided health care plans, most of which worked reasonably well until the world changed. Then, with people living longer past retirement, and with people changing jobs more often, what used to be a "one size fits all" plan started to bulge at the seams. But the incentives and mandates associated with the old plan prevented the growth of alternative setups that might have been better suited for the new realities. And here we are.

It perturbs me that people look at our current problem that stems from having too many of our eggs in the same basket and they decide to blame the basket. Most of the plans being pushed call for the creation of a spiffy, modern new basket, and this time making sure we put all of our eggs in it. As if the only problem with the current setup is that, last time, we missed a few eggs.

Cheap Critic: Angels and Demons

My wife occasionally watches how-to crafts shows on television. One of the episodes I remember sitting through (keeping her company, mostly) was a lady who took photographs (either personal snapshots or items cut out of magazines) and cut them into strips which she wove together and glued down to make a new composite image that was hoped to be more interesting than the photos she cut up.



Ron Howard's sequel to The DaVinci Code is a cinematic version of the same basic technique. In this film, director Opie took several tired, formulaic plots, cut them up into pieces and wove them together to form a rather-more-interesting composite. I can't think of a scene in the film that isn't a hoary old cliche, but the film, taken as a whole, is much more interesting than the sum of its parts.

It's well worth seeing, especially if you can find it in a reduced-price, second-run theater. (I paid $1.50 at our local second-run multiplex.) And if you don't have a local second-run theater it will be more-or-less OK on a decent television if you rent the DVD; it's not particularly and eye-candy extravaganza.

Spawn of Das Ubermaus!

In a previous installment we demonstrated the superiority of my homemade mouse trap because it captures clearly superior mice. Well, I caught another one last night.

As I was getting ready to head off to my secret location for releasing mice -- in a city park as far from other houses as feasible -- an idea hit me. What good is it to catch such high-quality mice in my garage if I can't find a way to use them to my advantage. That's when it occurred to me.



I had found this device in the Teleodaughter's room after she moved out. When you press the button on top a red ray shoots out the nose. I had immediately recognized it as a mind-control ray projector for mice. Perhaps I could use it on my ubermaus.



I applied the ray to the subject while thinking my instructions slowly and clearly. The mouse was to creep into homes people in the area and impersonate a Microsoft mouse. It should use the mouse-driver software installed on all modern computers to take control of the machine. It should then open the browser to this posting and wait for further instruction in the comments section.



So, my mind-controlled agent was ready for insertion which was performed at oh nine thirty this morning. All that remains now is to wait for him to report in from the field.

Are you there, Perry Rhodent?

9 0 9 0 6

One of my old, bald tires was also flat yesterday when I was leaving for work so I switched cars with the wife who made her shorter commute with the temporary, undersized comedy-tire spare while I drove her car to work. When I got home I swapped back, headed for the tire shop, got very slightly lost, and arrived just after they had closed at 6:00 pm.

Sitting in my car with the key-drop envelope I copied the odometer reading onto the blank -- 90906 miles -- and glanced at the sticker telling when I was due for my next oil change -- 90906 miles. What are the odds?* When Earl (the manager of Bull Tires) called this morning to say the car was ready I told him to change the oil, too. It seems I am supposed to change my oil. I can take a hint.

*about one in four thousand, more or less.

Forth of July Online Card and Newsletter.

Independence Day, 2009.

The 2008 Christmas cards never got out this year so I am doing a Forth of July 2009 newsletter to cover 2008 and the first half of 2009. I am pleased to be able to report that all family members are healthy and otherwise doing well. Here is a rundown of our current status:

Christopher graduated a year ago from the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, with a four-year degree in Graphics Design. He has returned to the Raleigh area where he works (and works and works) as a graphics designer for Capstrat – a communication company that specializes in advertising and corporate communications (fliers, brochures, etc.). Chris rents a room from his Army friend, Paul, and his wife, Jen, who have just had their first baby. Paul and Jen seem to appreciate Chris’s steadiness, his quiet lifestyle, and the rent that helps with the mortgage. Chris has a girlfriend named Reid who is finishing a PhD in Dye Chemistry at the NC State University College of Textiles.

Amber will be working for a few more weeks as a Medical Services Coordinator in the emergency room at the UNC Hospital. She will then move to St Petersburg, Florida, to attend the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Bradenton. She has been living with her parents for the last few months to save up money to finance the move. Amber’s boyfriend, Lee -- Lee the Younger, or Not-Quite-So-Big Lee, or Lee With Hair – is also moving to St Petersburg where his is currently looking for work. If you know of any west-coast Florida opportunities for a young man with a PhD in chemistry let us know. (Yes, both kids are dating PhD level chemists – go figure.) Her mother and I are elated that Amber has been accepted into medical school but will be sorry to see her go.

Irene still manages the Cheese case at the Harris Teeter Super Flagship store in Cary. The cheese biz is not altogether immune to the slow economy and the trips on the corporate jet to visit cheese manufacturers have not been in the picture during the last year. Hopefully, once the recession lets up a bit, Irene can get a bit more traction with her ideas to take Harris Teeter to new levels of cheesiness. In the meanwhile, Irene still enjoys her volunteer work as a Docent at the North Carolina Museum of Art, which will be closing many of their galleries for almost a year starting this summer while they move into a new (huge) facility. During the move Irene won’t be giving many tours but the classes on the collection will continue so she and the other docents can hit the ground running when the museum reopens in April 2010.

Lee is currently sitting at his computer, writing a mid-year family newsletter, and waiting for the phone to ring with job offers. He is switching to the first person -- now. He … that is, I had expected to ride out the tail of the recession working on a contract for the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources, but a black hole developed in the North Carolina State budget and the DENR contract was last seen near its event horizon. It may yet emerge (my champions at DENR assure me it didn’t actually fall into the black hole) but for now I am available. My previous employer, Keane, could not afford to keep me on their payroll while they found my next assignment but they are hopeful they can recall me, either for the DENR gig should it ever win its way free of the governor’s office, or for any of several other proposals they have bid. In addition, I have several other prospects I am working and, even if Keane comes up empty, I don’t expect to be unemployed for long so I am trying to enjoy it while it lasts.

One item on the plus side of unemployment is that it gives me an opportunity to do things with Irene as long as they don’t cost much money. We have both been getting more into photography. After a somewhat rocky start with her Kodak P712 (during which she struggled with the controls and the balky auto-focus) she has discovered that she really likes the long stabilized telephoto lens and birds without scaring them away. We’ve made multiple trips to the botanical gardens (which is free) in Chapel Hill and several to the NC Zoo (for which we have a membership). I’m glad she is enjoying her camera but I wish she would stop taking better photos that I do.

Hoping this finds all well.

Lee (Irene, Christopher and Amber).

The cover photo on this card is a composite of a photo Irene recently took of a distant thunder storm, and of some fireworks photos that I took from the deck of the Disney Wonder cruise ship.

Random Photos of Stuff We’ve Done.

Alaska Cruise: For our 30th anniversary, Irene and I took our second cruise of the Inland Passage of Alaska. This time we took my father and the kids along.
We sailed from Seattle and while we were there we had nice visits with Mike and Sandra, friends from our FSU days who we hadn’t seen in 30 years, and also with “Dex Quire”, a fellow blogger with whom I have struck up an online friendship through mutual weblog commentary. (http://dexquire.blogspot.com)

On the cruise we went…


... shopping in Ketchikan, and ...


... kayaking in Prince Rupert, and ...




... whale watching in Juneau.

Beach Week: Was on Hilton Head Island again last year. Somehow we never quite got around to that big group family photo – people kept leaving and arriving and we reached the end of the week to realize that there had never been a time when we were all there at the same time. Maybe this year we’ll get that photo for the Christmas card.




Graduation: Chris graduated from Ringling just before we all left for the Alaska trip. Irene and I went down for the occasion and the morning of Graduation Day we went walking on the beach at the Ft. DeSoto State Park. Irene, who has lost the tan that used to protect her growing up in central Florida, got sunburned and spent the Alaska cruise smeared with cocoa butter. Now the kids and I will forever associate the scent of cocoa butter with glaciers, floating ice and the frozen north.

Washington DC: Dad came up in the fall for a Thanksgiving visit and, while he was here, we drove up to Washington to visit his friend George and to wander around the Smithsonian a bit. George and Lenore Cohen were gracious hosts and we had a wonderful time. The first day we were there we took dad with us to see some of the sights but the second day we left him to visit with George and Lenore which he seemed to enjoy. The weather was perfect – more or less sunny days with light snow in the evenings. Dad and George went to high school together (Woodrow Wilson High, class of 1944) and also went to George Washington Medical School (class of 1950).




George invited Dean Martin, another GW 1950 graduate, for dinner and a mini-reunion.



Miscellany: A few photos that speak for themselves.


Pirate Night on Disney Wonder Cruise Ship w/ Irene's Disney Friends.


Lifeboat Drill on Disney Wonder


Irene in Nassau


Wildlife Photography in our Back Yard


Polar Bear at North Carolina Zoo