perfidy

In respect to recent events involving savage beheadings, Patton sez it good.

Thanks for the reminder, pigs. I, perhaps alone among my peers, have reached the peak of feeling badly for the actions of my countrymen; it's all downhill from here. The miscreants of the US military are on their way to the judgment and punishment they've so richly earned, and I sincerely hope that the same can soon be said for the followers of al Qaeda, bin Laden, and al-Zarqawi.

While I strongly suspect I'm a bleedinger-heart person than Patton is, and therefore may well reach greater peaks of disgust, dismay, outrage and shame in the future over the actions of my countrymen, I know one thing. At our worst, we're much, much better.

Have you seen every episode of "Oz"? Do you watch the "Shawshank Redemption" each of the 37 times it's on TV in a month? Wonder how you'd hold up in the race wars raging in America's penitentiaries?

Maybe you'd care to have a peek at your future.

Best,

Chinpainter

I have been considering distance for years.

It's a funny thing, distance.

A tiny distance can mean the difference between life and death: if the car were that much closer and had killed you outright; if the bullet had been that much closer to an artery you'd have bled to death in minutes; if you had fallen that much farther, and died instead of breaking your leg.

It is difficult to fit spatial distance in my head. We all manage, of course, as we live our lives to understand how far apart things are, and how inconvenient it will be to drive to most of them. But the randomness of distance, the lack of apparent reason governing the way things become proximate-or not- is more difficult to fathom. God has tried to explain it to me, but I don't listen to her because she confuses me.

Chronological distance is even worse, although it is predictable and not random. It's measured in time, after all, so barring relativistic speed, planetary gravity wells, or Atlantean crystals polished and buffed extra shiny, we all experience the same minutes and hours at the same rate. As I age, I am trying to better understand the relationship between the years I have lived and experienced to the years prior to my own sentience.

The distance, in other words, between what was and what is.

Which brings me to "The Breakfast Club". Yes, the movie. We've all seen it. Brian and his soup. I distinctly heard a ruckus. Moliere really pumps my 'nads. You remember. It was released in 1985.

There is a brief scene in "The Breakfast Club" where Judd Nelson's character, the stoner earring guy, mimics the signature riff from Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love". He knew it, we knew it; he dug the song, we dug the song.

Which brings me to "Disraeli Gears", the Cream record where that song first appeared. It was released in 1967.

The distance between "The Breakfast Club" and today is about 19 years, give or take the vagaries of release dates and premier venues and such. The distance between "The Breakfast Club" and "Disraeli Gears" is about 18 years.

We are farther from Judd Nelson's stoner earring guy than he was from Cream's first record.

I've been doing more comparisons like that recently. Sometimes they make me dizzy. Sometimes they make me sad. Sometimes they make me want bagels. Usually they occupy my mind enough to keep me awake for my long commute- there is a significant spatial distance to overcome between home and work.

Marginal Revolution links to a nifty site that maps the webs of interdependence between the boards of large companies and institutions. Y'know, like who sits on what board, and what other boards they sit on, and who sits on those boards, and how they all interrelate, as if it's a total of fifteen people sitting on all those boards.

Yeah, I know how paranoid and pedantic it sounds. Go check it out!

The site in question is called "They Rule," which might open the author up to charges of Liberal Scaremongering. Except the thing is, people like that do rule. There's a ruling oligarchy in the United States, only organic and casual rather than enshrined in law. People who know people do things; people who don't, pump gas.

Just look at our current Presidential candidates for an easy and relevant example: both are scions of monied families, both are Yale graduates; both are members of that silly-ass Skull 'N' Bone Thugz 'N' Harmony thing; and thanks to all this, both are blessed with the social and family connections to make som'n out of not much at all. The only way they could be more closely tied would be genetic, but that went out of fashion back in 1795.

I'm not drawing any pat moral or ideological conclusions from this, because that's stupid. But I will say this: class does matter in the United States, more than anyone will acknowledge.

Set your TiVos... Colonial House begins May 17th. I'm a fan of this entire genre of reality TV for pointy-heads. I've watched most or all of Frontier House, Manor House, 1900 House, Life in the Iron Age, and 1940s House, and look forward to watching modern Americans wipe with oak leaves, attend Puritan meetings, and attempt to remember whether the punishment for Slander is whipping or the stocks.

Y'know, 1628 was a pre-modern era, and ways of thinking, speaking, and ordering society that prevailed then are completely, disorientingly, alien to modern people. I will be interested to see the degree to which the producers and players will be willing to take that fact.

The X-Prize has a launch site! (New Mexico.) The New York Times has details, but the coolest part is this:

Organizers of the X Prize have said teams could attempt the space trip as early as this summer. Twenty-seven teams are expected to pursue the prize, and many have conducted test launches.

Twenty-seven teams (!) (!!) are in contention for a prize that will not even come close to recouping their costs. This is awesome.

Here's an interesting set of questions for those speculators among you. Given that Sea Launch has taken a financial beating recently in the wake of the failures of ventures like Iridium, which seem to suggest that the era of private space flight is not yet here*, what do you think the future will be like? Broadly, I see two competing models. One is the Sea Launch model which relies on loads of money and operational support to get their job done, and the other would be a potentially more mom-and-pop operation which would rely on economical and repeatable launches, though possibly of smaller payloads. Are these two models really in competetion, or will they be compatible as the era of private space flight dawns? Given that there is a LOT of risk in spaceborne ventures (viz. Iridium) and at the moment a limited number of things that space is actually useful for, will the near-future situation favor one or the other strategy of orbital lifting?

*Yes, yes, I understand that Iridium's problems were with the shoebox phones, the expensive, brittle, obselete and irreparable network, and the simple fact that there are at best only a few thousand people in the world who need to make a phone call from the Sargasso Sea. But from an enterprise/venture capital point of view, I suspect the word "space" currently sounds a bit like it does in the phrases "Space Monkey" or "Space TV Dinner."

An international team of archaeologists have discovered the location of the University of Alexandria, one of the seats of all Western learning. Notable alumni include: Archimedes, Ptolemy, Euclid, Eratosthenes, and Testicles.

The team has found 13 individual lecture halls, or auditoria, that could have accommodated as many as 5,000 students, according to archaeologist Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The classrooms are on the eastern edge of a large public square in the the Late Antique section of modern Alexandria and are adjacent to a previously discovered theatre that is now believed to be part of the university complex, Hawass said.

All 13 of the auditoria have similar dimensions and internal arrangements, he added. They feature rows of stepped benches running along the walls on three sides of the rooms, sometimes forming a joined “U” at one end.

The most conspicuous feature of the rooms, he added, is an elevated seat placed in the middle of the “U,” most likely designed for the lecturer.

“It is the first time ever that such a complex of lecture halls has been uncovered on any Greco-Roman site in the whole Mediterranean area,” Hawass said. This is “perhaps the oldest university in the world.”

Sometimes I think archaeologists have the coolest job in the world.

Fellow Virginian and Ohio expatriot Phil has enslickened his website. Check the new design and the story of a exceedingly clueless Chicago Alderman.

A little while back, we had a post on the list of "great works" that had been feverishly circulating the interweb. Several of us submitted our lists, highlighting the works we had read, or at the very least perused. But after the orgy of metooism had passed, the criticisms inevitably surfaced. Among the complaints: too much Russian lit, too much English romantic drivel, not enough humor or sf, Hemingway sucks, and in general that the list reads like a dead white male's greatest hits - with a few nods to the sob sisters. Johno undertook to start our own perfidious list, which will serve as a useful starting point:

HST: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Miller: The Canticle of Leibowitz
O'Rourke: Parliament of Whores
Stephenson: Cryptonomicon
Bester: The Stars My Destination
Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Toole: Confederacy of Dunces
Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow
Bukowski: Run With The Hunted
Burroughs: Naked Lunch
Hammett: The Maltese Falcon

(Before we go any further, I must establish my street cred by saying that I have read all of these except for Bukowski and Pynchon.) Johno's list has the goes in a completely different stylistic and philosophical direction than the original. I would offer, also a direction much better, reasonable and suited to the tastes of this webthingy.

Before we get really going, I think we need to make several ground rules for our list. If you disagree, savage them in the comments. First, nothing newer than, say, about 1970. Works need some time to settle into a canon, and we should not be thinking about something written after I was born. Second, philosophy and history should be eliminated from the list unless they have compelling literary value. Clausewitz is terrifically important, but nearly unreadable. Gibbon however, is a delight to read as well as being profoundly ensmartening. Third, light on the poetry. And fourth, no matter how painful it is, no more than one example of an artist�s work unless they are a) Shakespeare, b) writing in two distinctly different genres/modes, or c) both. 

If we combine Johno's list and implicit challenge with the flawed but still useful original list that we got from the Oldsmoblogger, we might have something nifty-keen. I would offer these amendations to the original list: No Brontes, and substitute Emma for P&P. No Cooper - read Twain if you are in doubt. Who the hell is Silko, anyway? He's the only one on the list I've never heard of. He's gone. Turgenev? There are several Russians better suited to the list, and likewise Pasternak. Tolstoy, Chekov, Dostoevskiy - that should be sufficient. No Morrison, either. The Shakespeare list should be Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, History of Henry IV part II, and the sonnets. The rest, they shall stay as they are. If we add Johno's list in its entirety, along with:

Milton, John - Paradise Lost
Chandler, Raymond - The Long Goodbye
God - The Bible
Gibbon - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Frank Herbert - Dune
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Ring

we are heading in the right direction. Everyone pile on in the comments!

"I take full responsibility."

Donald Rumsfeld said this to Congress last week, during hearings. I never thought the phrase would be so empty of meaning. Can one utter the phrase, then do nothing? What else is being done? I do not necessarily mean that the only acceptable path is that Rumsfeld resign. It is this: When one takes full responsibility, some level of personal sacrifice is required; if none is proffered, then the acceptance is meaningless.

I cheer for small aviation businesses; it's so hard to get into the game, and so many participants do it for love, instead of for rational reasons. One man's aviation business dream just came to an end, when he took full responsibility:

Important Information for Customers

Customer experience has uncovered a type of pump failure never experienced in years of field and laboratory testing of the dual rotor vacuum pump design, including the deliberate destruction of over 300 test pumps. These failures resulted in malfunctioning of both pumping chambers simultaneously. The failures are concentrated on the 300 horsepower Lycoming IO-540 engines. We believe that these engines generate a resonant frequency resulting in breakage of both graphite rotors. Multiple replacement pumps have failed on three different engines. At this point, we can’t be certain about similar failures occurring on other engines. A failure rate of 3%, while seemingly small, is not acceptable for our product. Although the dual rotor pumps are performing well in the other 97% of installations, shipping of dual rotor pumps has been halted. The tens of thousands of dollars of orders on hand will not be filled. Aero Advantage refuses to continue marketing a product that might not perform satisfactorily for all its customers.

Aero Advantage was founded, in good faith, to improve safety of flight and to allow greater peace of mind for its customers by eliminating sudden loss of the vacuum source. While the precise changes that are needed to improve reliability may already be in place, they would likely require between 3 and 9 months to finalize and place into production. The company can not survive the financial burden of having no sales for that length of time and is closing its doors. Closure of the business was an extremely difficult decision for me, the inventor and company founder, since I have invested five years of work and most of my life’s savings in the business.

Several parties have expressed an interest in procuring the current technology and continuing the development of the necessary product improvements.

It is with much regret that I announce the above decision. I believe it is the correct one for all concerned.

Sincerely,

David A. Boldenow

Aero Advantage
My condolences, and respect, to Mr. David Boldenow. I'm sure he'll succeed at whatever he does next, and whoever deals with him will know he is of good character.